Maemo and Moblin "merge" to form MeeGo

On Monday, just after the release of our third issue, Nokia and Intel held a joint press conference to announce that the roadmaps of Moblin and Maemo were converging. The resulting operating system, MeeGo, would target phones, tablets and netbooks and be held under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation as a fully open source OS: The announcement dealt with the technical and governance aspects but the large Maemo community was thrown into turmoil. What was the impact on Maemo 6, due out later this year with pre-release SDKs expected shortly? What about the Maemo Community Council and the summit? What about talk.maemo.org; was MeeGo just for "techies"? The timing was unfortunate for our issue, but we never claimed to be timely - just to try and encompass the broadest range of news about Maemo! So, the last week has provided many of the answers:

* All the community aspects were left to the community to thrash out, this left us scratching our heads as to who was in each of the communities and how they could work together. This has started to solidify with the people involved having discussions and a website scope meeting planned. The March Community Council elections will continue as planned, with a large scope of work ahead of them.

* Maemo 6 will be released under the "MeeGo" brand and the official answer of "we don't know" for whether or not Nokia will be releasing Harmattan officially for the N900 is still up in the air. However, given MeeGo's open source base, the chances of it being ported to the N900 are higher than perhaps they were before.

* MeeGo will use RPM rather than the deb package format Maemo has used to date. Indeed, most of the implementation of the lower parts of the platform (which are common in architecture but obviously subtly different in code) seem to be coming from Moblin. One of Moblin's targets is the five-second boot which, although of limited direct use in an always-on ARM device, can only bring benefits elsewhere in the system in terms of performance.

* OBS, as used by Mer, and provided by Novell, will (almost certainly) be the local and remote build system; replacing Scratchbox and the maemo.org autobuilder. However, with cross-platform and cross-compiling development tools like Qt Creator and MADDE (or its cousins) continue, such low-level details will be hidden from most end-user application developers (unless they choose to get stuck into them).

MeeGo is the single most important thing to happen to Maemo since the 770 was announced. There are still many questions and the future of the Maemo community will be whatever we make it. As such, this issue of MWKN will have as the top stories in each section the most applicable and important MeeGo news for developers and the community.


Google Summer of Code 2010

Valério Valério has kicked off the Maemo community's second year of involvement in Google's Summer of Code. GSoC is a mentorship programme, sponsored by Google, whereby projects will be given paid students for the summer. Valério says, Last year's programme was successful and so if you have an idea which a student could implement and/or are willing to act as a mentor, please pitch your idea on the wiki and get involved.


Become an MWKN contributor

We're still on the lookout for contributors and sub-editors who can either send links our way or flesh out the links into the issue we publish on a Monday. To start off as a contributor, all you have to do for your interview is send a few tweets @mwkn. Sub-editors are also welcome, please just get in touch if you're interested.



In this edition...

1. Front Page
   • Maemo and Moblin "merge" to form MeeGo
   • Google Summer of Code 2010
   • Become an MWKN contributor
2. Applications
   • New apps & games coming soon for Maemo
   • PhotoTranslator - OCR & translation from photos
   • BBC iPlayer for the N900
   • ...and 2 more
3. Development
   • Licensing change requests queue open for Nokia-closed packages
   • Getting started with Maemo development on Fedora
   • DirectUI (Harmattan's Qt-based toolkit) demos available in extras-devel for Maemo 5
   • ...and 3 more
4. Community
   • MeeGo community website coordination IRC meeting 2010-02-24 20:00 UTC
   • Meego Who's who in Maemo, Moblin and MeeGo
   • Start planning the next Maemo, MeeGo and/or Moblin Summit
   • ...and 3 more
5. Devices
   • Intel, Nokia aim to unify mobile Linux ecosystem with MeeGo
   • Impact of MeeGo on Mer: just a bunch of redshirts?
   • Who still uses N8x0? What would you like to see in the OS?
   • ...and 4 more