For you people who don't believe in Meego on the N900.....

Hey there! And welcome to MeeGo project on my behalf too. In this post written on behalf of the MeeGo Technical Steering Group I will address some of the top questions on everybody's mind and written all-across meego.com by now. By doing so, I also will outline the first concrete steps to get the core of the software work on foot by all of us together, including various mobile computing companies and individual members of moblin and maemo communities.

But let me first introduce myself: My name is Valtteri Halla. I am the Nokia member of the currently two-person Technical Steering Group (TSG) of MeeGo. A Nokia old-timer already since '97, I lately used to introduce myself to Ari Jaaksi's new team-members: I have spent >75% of my Nokia career in bringing Open Source and Linux to Nokia and >50% of my adult life on the same mission. So, I guess I might be a bit biased :-)

And now to the business: The most important question is of course about the code. We hope to move on here very quickly now. Nokia and Intel have set the target to open the MeeGo repository by the end of this month. I guess this is something that finally will signify the real "Day One" of MeeGo project, a genuine merger of moblin and maemo. What is scheduled to be available then is the first and very raw baseline to a source and binary repository to build MeeGo trunk on Intel ATOM boards and Nokia N900.

While code is certainly the most important question, the most frequently asked, however, has been about technology selections. The big ticket items like Qt, OBS and RPM were already communicated at the launch and as we expected, kicked off a few small avalanches of debate! These selections were, of course, pre-agreed and I can assure you that the amount of effort spent in resolving these was not small. After all, these are the points driving most of the investment cost and transition pains for Nokia, Intel and the Moblin and Maemo communities. Further selections are mostly still under discussion and beyond a few obvious ones (X, connman, ofono, gstreamer, dbus,...) can be considered as working assumptions for MeeGo 1 release. Now that the internal responsibilities within Intel and Nokia are becoming clear I expect that the people behind these selections and assumptions will start appearing in meego.com pages, mailing lists and wikis during the coming days.

Once we just get going the objective is to have all of the MeeGo platform work fully in public. During the last few years both Nokia and Intel have learned that the success of moblin and maemo R&D mode fundamentally comes from the Open Source way of openness and MeeGo is a huge further commitment on this path. MeeGo will be a complete yet not entirely productised Linux distribution, it is fully Open Source in code and in process. What will our computers, and the whole world for that matter, look like when constraints of engineering resources and software innovation go away with standard pure Open Source becoming the default in mainstream computing products?

The final thing for this post is about practices of getting the open way of working off the ground. Here I would really like to ask for your help and co-operation. This is critical and this is always a challenge for big new projects. Thanks to starting points from moblin and maemo, it should not take that long for MeeGo. Both Intel and Nokia teams have considerable experience in openness and open source skills are becoming quite commonplace nowadays. Still, there are some bumps to be expected: MeeGo is supposed to go beyond its parents in openness. Also, MeeGo is not just a combination of the existing moblin and maemo teams but it also means that much much more people from Intel, Nokia and other companies will get involved as open source makes its inroads to device business mainstream. Yet MeeGo operations are expected and designed to be completely transparent - R&D in the public internet! This is still a baffling proposition to many. Some do not want to do it, some do not dare, many do not know how to. We still have a trainload of openness virgins here! Herding the teams to go public will be a big task for Imad, me and others, no doubt. So, this is where we need your help. Please make this happen with us by maintaining constructive dialogue, together finding out the MeeGo way-of-working and being patient and encouraging with newbies not to scare them back inside corporate firewalls. BTW, I find it very encouraging to read meego-dev and notice many maemo veterans like Nils, Carsten, Randy and many others doing exactly this already. You guys get it. And I am very excited to know that with moblin community there will be equally big legion of talented people I have an opportunity and privilege to meet soon. This talent is, after all, fundamentally the thing why most of us believe MeeGo will grow to become great and why we are so passionate about our M*:s and not some other technology for mobile computing, right? :-)