MeeGo: the merger of Maemo and Moblin [LWN.net]

MeeGo: the merger of Maemo and Moblin

Posted Feb 17, 2010 10:53 UTC (Wed) by Hanno (guest, #41730)
Parent article: MeeGo: the merger of Maemo and Moblin

The bickering about deb vs rpm and GTK vs Qt is quite annoying and it doesn't address the really interesting issues about Meego.

Nokia and Intel have a proven positive track record in the Linux community by now. Maemo seems to have been an experiment within Nokia to join the Open Source community as a good corporate citizen and hey, they did exceedingly well within the limits of their interal corporate politics. There must be a lot of internal conflict that the Maemo rebels have to battle within Nokia and they should be applauded for what they have achieved so far. Intel is also the poster boy of open source involvement and we OSS people easily seem to forget what an evil hardball monopolistic company Intel actually is: Well, yeah, they crush their competitors with illegal behaviour, but look, they publish source code...!

Moblin was announced in 2007 with a lot of thunder, but so far, did any company release an actual product based on it? (I haven't seen any, but would love to hear about anything.) Maemo has also seen a lot of positive PR, but at any given time during the last years, there was only one active product by a serious company. (*) So what we see here is the merging of two ambitious projects with only one device on sale by one company supporting that device.

On the other hand, Android got announced and within a very show time, has several devices by several different companies on sale, right now.

So where are the Meego products? Any announcements? Release dates? And which companies will develop for it, except Nokia and Intel? Where are the developer teams?

And how will Meego address the "Less than free" business model of Android?

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MeeGo: the merger of Maemo and Moblin

Posted Feb 17, 2010 10:57 UTC (Wed) by Hanno (guest, #41730) [Link]

Oh, forgot the (*) - there is at least one obscure Maemo-product by an Asian company, but it seems to be a release-and-forget device with no additional software development after its release.

MeeGo: the merger of Maemo and Moblin

Posted Feb 17, 2010 15:44 UTC (Wed) by Hanno (guest, #41730) [Link]

Ubuntu Netbook Remix is not Moblin, afaik.

Dell/Ubuntu netbook

Posted Feb 17, 2010 15:58 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

It is indeed Moblin-based. Your editor reviewed it back in November.

Dell/Ubuntu netbook

Posted Feb 17, 2010 16:00 UTC (Wed) by Hanno (guest, #41730) [Link]

Thanks for clarifying, my editor.

Dell/Ubuntu netbook

Posted Feb 21, 2010 2:55 UTC (Sun) by Burgundavia (guest, #25172) [Link]

Ubuntu Netbook Edition (formerly Remix) is not based on Moblin. It uses a bunch of tech developed in house at Canonical, including a launcher, some panel applets and a way of keeping windows maximized.

There is a moblin variant that was created for 9.10, but there has been no work in this cycle, that I can find. I believe that is the same work that LWN reviewed on a Dell, although not having played with it, I cannot say for certain.