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Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo DiasporaBergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo DiasporaPosted Jul 11, 2012 11:28 UTC (Wed) by tf (subscriber, #85123)In reply to: Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora by shmerl Parent article: Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora
Haha, if in doubt, go down the conspiracy theory route.
MeeGo was a *brand* which never really got beyond the PR releases, conference swag, and half baked compliance documents, to producing tangible technology. The decision to form MeeGo from Moblin and Maemo was technically ill informed and lacking in the most basic understanding of the two platforms. The profound incompatibility between the two meant that while either Moblin or Maemo were viable platforms in their own right, MeeGo never was, and so it's not very surprising the promised platform (as opposed to the brand) never materialized; what was shipping under the MeeGo brand (N9; 'Moblin aka MeeGo' Netbook) were essentially two different, incompatible (and discontinued) platforms.
The Nokia decision to pull the plug on its MeeGo involvement was not only perfectly rational, it would have been managerially irresponsible not to. If anything is irrational in the MeeGo story, it is both Nokia and Intel thinking it was a good idea to start with.
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Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 11, 2012 12:39 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
It was not just a brand. If you've not seen all the most excellent work Nokia people and contractors did upstream in the past years at all levels of the stack (from kernel to high-level frameworks) you've not followed a lot of the projects lwn is about.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 12, 2012 8:09 UTC (Thu) by tf (subscriber, #85123) [Link]
I don't think you understand what a platform is, the same way that MeeGo publicity had systematically failed to differentiate between an aspiration ('aims to') and reality ('is').
If you look up the MeeGo About page, you will see the statement 'the MeeGo project *provides* a Linux-based, open source software platform for the next generation of computing devices ... designed to give developers the broadest range of device segments to target for their applications, including netbooks, handheld computing and communications devices, in-vehicle infotainment devices, smart TVs, tablets and more – all using a *uniform* set of APIs based on Qt.' -- by this definition MeeGo as a platform never existed. (Emphasis mine.)
On the 1.1 release, the LinuxFoundation stated 'MeeGo supports a magnitude[!] of mobile client devices (handsets, connected TVs, in-vehicle infotainment ..., netbooks, and tablets)'. Again, this statement confuses aspiration and reality; MeeGo by its self-definition never supported any of these; looking at the 1.1 release page, it officially 'supported', netbooks, handsets and IVI, but only the netbook was of release quality (see the 'known issues'), and the Netbook continued to be just Moblin rebranded! This had not changed by the 1.2 release, except by then the handset as a supported platform is no longer on the release page.
So, the only form factor that MeeGo (as released) ever *really* supported (i.e., you could deploy the OS in production) was the netbook, and the netbook was based on the Moblin software stack, which is completely different from the MeeGo common APIs (clutter, gtk).
Harmattan was, by Nokia's own statement Maemo under the MeeGo brand; it overlapped with MeeGo only to the extent to which MeeGo borrowed from Maemo (see http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=529073).
So the only two things that ever shipped under the MeeGo *brand* were Maemo and Moblin rebranded (and both of these would have happened without any great differences, just under different branding, if the MeeGo project was not created; this is worth reflecting upon).
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 12, 2012 9:00 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
I don't seek I *care*. 'platform' is a marketing ideal that does not exist in real-life. 'Platform' is what you would get if only you could rewrite everything at once in a single homogeneous whole. 'Platform'-oriented people battle their own partners to prevent them from getting useful stuff done now and insist they should wait for the pure 'platform' solution that will materialize someday (just like SUN fought tooth and nail to get everyone to use the universally hated swing, and ended up with no gui presence at all)
Real-life successful products are mongrels that accept the holy platform is an ideal that won't be attained, and make it easy to reuse code written for previous platform endeavours.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 11, 2012 20:42 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
Not at all. As we can see Mer project collected what was good in the Meego project, and addressed what was bad there (in particular the bad corporate control). Now both PlasmaActive and Jolla found Mer to be a good base. Nokia *could* play it right, but they failed or intentionally didn't do it.
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