Thread: Chrome, Moblin, the Intel-Nokia Collaboration - I Don't Get It
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benny1967 is offline benny1967
2009-11-20 , 12:46
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#1
Warning! May contain traces of speculation and conspiracy theories!

Remember the Intel/Nokia press release from June this year?
Further uniting the Internet with mobile phones and computers, Intel Corporation and Nokia today announced a long-term relationship to develop a new class of Intel® Architecture-based mobile computing device and chipset architectures which will combine the performance of powerful computers with high-bandwidth mobile broadband communications and ubiquitous Internet connectivity.
The Intel and Nokia effort includes collaboration in several open source mobile Linux software projects. Intel will also acquire a Nokia HSPA/3G modem IP license for use in future products. The companies expect many innovations to result from this collaboration over time.
Now Google makes progress on ChromeOS, and reveals that it's largely based on work done for Moblin and Ubuntu. GTK, Clutter, the usual suspects.

So the picture as I see it is that there's a ecosystem of several OS's for mobile internet devices forming around the Gnome universe, with Moblin being something like the one thing in the center of it that maybe shares most with all the others.

Maemo was (and still is) an active part of all this, up to and including Maemo 5.

Which is good. It helps moving code from one OS to the other. (ChromeOS being an exception, of course, but still...)

Now we know that Maemo will be slowly drifting away because of the Qt-decision. I don't know if other components will be changed, too, but the GTK-Qt-move is enough to make Maemo a distant cousin rather than a brother.

At least that's how it seems to me.

But: What was this Intel/Nokia agreement in June all about? Have we seen any outcome of this? I don't think we have. Thinking of Intel as "the Moblin world" and of Nokia as "the Maemo world", wouldn't it be reasonable to expect Maemo and Moblin moving closer together at least at some level? There's been no mention of it since June.

What does all this mean? Do you think the people behind Chrome OS, Ubuntu, Moblin and Maemo coordinate their efforts, even though they're working in completely different markets?
Or is all of this just happening more or less randomly, no plan, no common development?

And again: How does the press release from June fit in? What would we expect from a cooperation between Intel and Nokia? They state it's not only about hardware... Yet, we haven't seen anything software-wise. Is there something cooking behind the scenes?