Thread: Cleaning N900 FUD
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qgil is offline qgil
2010-03-03 , 08:56
Posts: 3,105 | Thanked: 11,088 times | Joined on Jul 2007 @ Mountain View (CA, USA)
#181
Originally Posted by bigbrovar View Post
The news of maemo merging with moblin to form meego is a big anti climax and it further again put a big question mark in Nokia's commitment to maemo (or meego).
In the 3 years I have been working at Nokia I have contributed to at least 3 GREAT news: (by chronological order)

- Qt going LGPL
- Maemo 5 launch
- MeeGo

MeeGo is the best news of all of them, since it contains the implications of the other 2.

About commitment, the MeeGo setting implies a much higher commitment from Nokia: targeting explicitly Nokia's high end devices, co-founding with Intel, under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, more corporate partners to come, many ingredients to expect OSS projects and contributors to come...

And Maemo lovers should feel much better with the MeeGo news. In the short term you will benefit from a much more attractive developer offering. In the long run you are hitting the point yourself:

Currently the mobile space is very crowded and no other OS space is as competitive as the mobile phone space we have android, Iphone OS, windows Mobile, WebOS, Symbian etc all craving for developers mind share. For an OS to survive in this space it needs consistency (among many other things) and solid support and backing of some Big Tech company who is ready to go all the way. They also need to be stable toolkit and sdk well documented which developers can work with when porting their apps.
MeeGo sounds to me much more fit to succeed that a lone Maemo could aim.

The situation with maemo or meego is so confusing and I really dont see developers wanting to spend their time on that platform. One day we are all looking forward to maemo6 which was suppose to be the last step toward having a consumer ready maemo device. Next thing we know Nokia announces that its scraping maemo and merging it with moblin to form meego. Hence its like Nokia just hit the reset button and everything is back to square one.
Not true. In terms of application developers any announcement done relative to Maemo 6 is equally valid for MeeGo. With Maemo 6 we have been always been clear pushing Qt and also Web Runtime. This is the very same deal for MeeGo, wit the difference that now they will be able to target not only Nokia handsets but also Intel/Atom based devices and whatever MeeGo devices will be announced in the future. And Symbian, but this was also explained already in the context of Maemo 6.

And yes, today Harmattan/MeeGo are still not very clear for application developers. But there is not even an alpha SDK, which is the clearest signal for them. In the meantime Qt 4.6 and the Qt development tools are comming as officially supported to Maemo 5, and we are telling them clearly that this is the best path to reach Harmattan/MeeGo.

For now we are told that meego is just a branding and would infact be maemo6 so they wont be much change to the maemo6 road map. But what happens after maemo6 what are the plans for maemo7 or 8 seriously no one can tell.
Of course we can tell. The future is MeeGo. Harmattan is a bit in between waters but will offer the MeeGo API, which is what matters to most developers. After that pure MeeGo will come to Nokia. No Maemo 6,7,8.


Even maemo core developers are not certain about the future of meego.
What is the uncertainty? Where can I find the logs or the records to help clarifying?

The average Maemo core developer (working for Nokia) got to know about MeeGo just a little before the rest of you so don't expect all the answers from all of them right now. MeeGo is fundamentally an open project and most of those developers have access to the same information you can get.

Some of us are dealing directly with the bootstrapping process, trying to push outside all the things that need to go out from the Intel/Nokia offices. It's taking some time but we are pushing this as priority number 1.

But I seriously dont see meego making it mainstream anything soon.
I see it making it mainstream! Who bets an ice cream? I love ice cream and I want to win lots!!!

Ohh.. wait.. this wouldn't be fair since actually I have insider information.

Still, even without ice cream please remember this bet. :P
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