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MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H)MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H)Posted Oct 11, 2012 4:27 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)In reply to: MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) by swetland Parent article: MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H)
I wouldn't go quite that far - there are some cases where earlier involvement with the community would have resulted in a reduction of Google's maintenance load, and there are cases where Google's implementation is demonstrably technically inferior to existing Linux solutions. But the real question is whether any of this matters, and I think it's difficult to argue that any shortcomings in Android's adoption are down to the choice of C library. So we might quibble over "massively better", but you're probably right.
There's no real way to argue that Android is bad. It's the most successful smartphone platform, and the dominant user-visible Linux. Perhaps adopting some of the existing technologies would have made it *better*, but at this stage it's pretty clear that the people arguing that (such as me) should actually do the work and stop expecting that purely theoretical arguments will win out against a shipping product.
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MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 11, 2012 6:46 UTC (Thu) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
The point is that Jolla is not intimidated by the existing products or their dominance. Let Android be, if it wants to go on a different unrelated road - so be it. But regular Linux will enter the mobile scene for the benefit which Android failed to provide. Jolla is doing something important.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 11, 2012 11:48 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
How does Jolla's proprietary user interface compare to Android in terms of community interaction? Jolla's approach sounds like a warming over of Nokia's Maemo strategy with company spokespeople wagging their finger and lecturing the community about not asking for too much (only this time also mimicking the "parent" by making vague patent threats), and contributing back to upstream projects because not doing so would either be a licence violation or involve an unaffordable maintenance burden.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 11, 2012 15:26 UTC (Thu) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
As I explained already, the UI is the most upper level. Android's rift goes much deeper, up to hardware. Jolla takes the community openly governed core (Mer) for the whole lower stack and middleware. So their closed layer is a rather thin addition on top. It's better than Nokia approach which didn't use community governed core, and way better than Android which doesn't have open development at all and caused a huge split with a regular Linux stack.
Plus, there are fully open options like Nemo and Plasma Active, based on the same Mer core, which one will be able to use on the same devices. So Jolla is doing a very good thing, their closed UI part regardless.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 12, 2012 14:35 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
We'll have to see how thin that UI layer is, but I don't think the importance of the UI layer can be emphasized enough. At the very least, proprietary user interfaces and applications still carry all the risks of planned obsolescence, lack of user control/insight, and all the accompanying privacy and maintenance concerns.
Linux can be made to run acceptably on lots of devices, and there's plenty of unfunded community activity already going on that can deliver quite a bit of the stack - you just have to see how QtMoko (the community-maintained variant of Qtopia) still manages to roll along, regardless of whether anyone thinks it is blazing new trails - but cultivating a community around applications is something that the likes of Nokia only did in order to get access to the bits they needed. As a result of all this, people pin a lot of hope on Plasma Mobile (or whatever it's called this week) because it at least gives them the possibility to define their own platform.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a similar level of enthusiasm for Jolla's "open core" as there was for Nokia's efforts, where contributors merely get the satisfaction that their code is being used from the outside of a tamper-proof glass case. The difference between then and now is hopefully that more people are wise to the game being played.
MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H) Posted Oct 12, 2012 16:58 UTC (Fri) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
"Plasma Mobile (or whatever it's called this week)"
Plasma Active, and no, it has never been called anything else, so why the sneer?
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