Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora

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).