Thread: Maemo: 100% Free Software (GPL, etc...)
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Stskeeps is offline Stskeeps
2009-08-10 , 20:44
Posts: 1,671 | Thanked: 11,478 times | Joined on Jun 2008 @ Warsaw, Poland
#10
Originally Posted by Texrat View Post
There are some aspects, especially in the HAL, that address proprietary details. I have my doubts that Maemo can completely get away from the need to rely on a certain amount of proprietary binary blobs.
The good news is that they're mostly relying on them for hardware support (GPS driver, DSP tasks, bootloader, WiFi+Bluetooth firmware..). The 80% open source is perfectly capable of running on it's own (see Mer), but the 20% is really what makes Maemo usable by ordinary users (utilities, control panel applets, themes, sounds, virtual keyboards, etc.).

An interesting discussion is however. If Maemo was like Android - a basic OS/platform that's usable from the time you install it with browser, e-mail, etc (given proper HW support).And open source, cross-platform and adaptable by any hardware vendor - meaning if one killer app comes out for one device, it'll be out for the others as well.

Would it then be possible to make a business based on this with vendor-specific differentiation (Flash, codecs, location based services, whatever), brand and hardware quality?
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