Hello everyone.

I have a question:

What percent of Maemo is Free and what percent is proprietary?

Maemo is 100% Free (FOSS)?

If not, what part is proprietary?

Is it possible to get rid of them?


Thank you.

PS: Quelqu'un aurai-t-il aussi des réponses sur Maemo 5?


FOSS= Free and Open Source Software.

Ten months ago, it was 80% open, 20% closed:

http://www.slideshare.net/silpol/nok...n-presentation

But, a lot has changed since then. And, there's another thread that speaks to this, but I don't have time to find it right now.

GeneralAntilles?

Tim

It was an unfortunate sidetrack in the Maemo Rewritten thread, but let's keep any further discussion here.

I think it would be fair to say between 80-90% now and there are people working on pushing that number way higher as we speak.

Do you think we could have a Maemo 5 100% Free?

The non-Libre concerning the management of the hardware?

I don't think Maemo 5 will be 100% free, but it will probably start a lot more free than the previous tablets did. Honestly, it's hard to say anything about Maemo 5 since we don't have it in our hands and we don't have the hardware... so....

Ok, thank you everyone for your responses.

But why Nokia don't make Maemo 100% Free?

Making Maemo 100% free is a secondary goal for Nokia/Maemo. Nokia's goal is to make money by selling the tablet, so if there is a closed-source app or driver and it saves them the time of implementing it themselves, they'll do it so the device can be released sooner and allow the community to rewrite the app or driver if they see fit.

The other issue is that there isn't always an ability to open source drivers, especially for proprietary pieces of hardware because external companies haven't released their source or forbid it.

A 100% free Maemo is definitely a community goal. I don't think it's realistic to expect or demand a 100% open source operating system/apps from a company that is attempting to push the limits of design/use. Also, almost no companies out there open source their apps/operating system for their machines/devices because they are trying to make sure a rival doesn't just grab their source code and go "oh, that's how they did that cool thing we didn't... let's try that too".

There's always going to be a bit of a balancing act between giving away everything and trying to make money. I would cut Nokia some slack. They clearly WANT to make everything open source if possible and they have some clearly dedicated people pushing that (such as Quim).

Maybe someday.

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?