Akademy: Plasma Active and Make Play Live

Creating an open device is a difficult challenge; the software is (mostly) there, but the hardware is a different story. Aaron Seigo has been working on the Vivaldi tablet as part of the Make Play Live effort and reported on some of the hurdles that have been encountered trying to produce the device at Akademy. There are lots of pieces that go into such a device, so finding a combination that works and can be sold is a non-trivial task.

Plasma Active

Plasma Active—the touch-enabled version of KDE's Plasma environment—came out of a discussion that various people working on Plasma had about the technology and asking "where do we go from here?", Seigo said. KDE has a desktop suite, with office, email, and many other applications, but "is that all we want to do?". To he and others, it felt like KDE was treading water, but the discussions made it clear that some in the project were not happy with just that.

He believes very strongly in freedom and technology, and he started looking beyond the desktop and laptops where KDE has traditionally been focused. When you look at mobile devices, set top boxes, and other systems like those, you don't see the freedom and openness that we have come to expect. There is an inherent need for some humans to hack, but devices are "increasingly not places where you can hack, unless Apple says you can".

There is this idea that a "tablet is a tablet, a laptop is a laptop", he said, but that is "increasingly silly". There is a continuum of devices, without sharp divisions between them. We have started to see others picking up on that, and releasing hybrid devices recently, like a media center that is controlled by a tablet or phone, tablets with keyboards, and so on.

So, Plasma Active arose out of Plasma Netbook and Plasma Desktop. It provides one KDE and Qt-based technology that can be used across all kinds of devices. The difference between Plasma Active and the netbook/desktop versions is 10-15,000 lines of code—out of a code base of some third-of-a-million lines. So there are "tiny differences" between the two, and things written for one will work on the other. This is a "compelling reason" to use Plasma Active on all these different kinds of devices, Seigo said.

Android: best friend and worst enemy

Seigo cited Android as the "best friend and worst enemy of open devices". It uses the Linux kernel, and it is great that there are so many devices out there running Linux. But Google does no GPL enforcement, which results in mostly binary-only devices. For device manufacturers, getting Android to boot is the end goal so that the device can be sold. Once they can deliver a working binary kernel to their customers, they are done.

We are dealing with cultural and business barriers when trying to deliver open devices, he said. All the manufacturing for these devices is in China, increasingly the design is being done there as well. To build open devices, you must work with the cultures of Asia, but most KDE developers are based in Europe or North America and are not familiar with those cultures. In addition, the manufacturers are "all about volume" and, at least so far, open devices are not selling in quantities that make them interesting. He is not just reporting these problems "because it sucks", he said, but because "I think there are things we can do about it together".

He asked: Can we overcome these problems? His experience shows that it is "a very big mountain to climb", but it is something that the community has to take on itself. These problems are not something that big companies are interested in, so "we need to take our destiny in our own hands".

From an implementation standpoint, there are three pieces of software that need to work well together. The kernel, which needs a user space that works with it, and a "human experience" on top of that. Seigo uses the term "human experience" rather than "user experience" because "humans are not users", he said.

As a community, KDE does the human experience part, and there are folks in the project with some experience in the other two. Seigo asked how many in the room had written a kernel module and got a few raised hands. "We need you guys", he said, and asked that they bring their friends. These days, user space is tightly coupled to the kernel, he said, so the two need to be in sync.

Plasma Active itself is ready to go to provide the human experience; version 3 will be released in the next few months. One recent addition is a "nice touch-friendly file manager", Seigo said, and Plasma Active is more than just a desktop shell. It is enabling other applications, like Calligra and Marble, to work well on touch devices. In addition, a recent two or three day effort turned Okular into a touch enabled e-book reader using QML.

Lots of code has been taken from the desktop for Plasma Active, but there are parts that will flow back to Plasma in the future as well. Many KDE applications can be made touch-friendly relatively easily, he said, and developers of any applications that might ever run on a tablet, phone, set top box, etc. should be thinking about that. When he hears application developers talking about separating the business logic from the presentation, that's a sign things are headed in the right direction

Vivaldi progress

Seigo and a partner started Make Play Live (MPL) to create "ethically correct devices" that are hackable. A business ecosystem has also been built around it to support the effort. The plan is to create a tablet called Vivaldi, but there have been some problems along the way.

Seigo held up the tablet, noting that it was the second revision of the hardware that was received from MPL's hardware partner. Using that hardware, the company got 98% of the way there, he said, and were demonstrating the device widely. It just needed a "little more polish" before it was ready to ship. Then, the third revision of the hardware arrived.

The new hardware looked identical—on the outside—but was "completely different" internally. MPL found out about the changes after the fact, and was not able to provide input into the new design. Because the volume of devices that MPL could promise to sell was fairly low, the manufacturer had little interest in consulting or even notifying the company about the changes.

The earlier revision had been running a modified Mer user space atop the Android kernel distributed by the manufacturer, but that no longer works on the most recent hardware revision. There is a "solution in the pipes" to that problem, Seigo said, but that set Vivaldi back. The device manufacturers don't really want to invest in Linux per se, but want to focus on Android, which is a different thing.

In the Q&A session, Seigo further explained some of the problems that MPL had run into. Unless it can promise a quarter of a million (or some other six-digit number) of units, MPL won't be able to get any input into the process. "Our order is a rounding error" on the total number of units the device manufacturers are targeting. He certainly doesn't blame the hardware companies as they are focused on their bottom line. It would be great if MPL (or open devices in general) could rely on large companies to take the baton and dangle that kind of volume in front of the manufacturers, but that doesn't seem likely.

Part of the problem is that there is "little respect for the GPL" in Asia, Seigo said. When you ask for the source to the kernel for a device, you first get pointed at kernel.org. Once you make it clear that there is more needed, you will get a tarball with "amazing stuff", some of which has nothing to do with the device in question. Comparing that to what's running on the device shows differences, so you have to ask: "Now can we really get the source?". There is also often resistance from the hardware salespeople to the whole idea of getting the source as they think the company will go bankrupt if they give it away. When setting out on this task, Seigo said that he had no idea "how hard it would be to get GPL source" from the vendors.

The MPL partner network consists of nine companies so far who are concentrating on various pieces of the problem, like human experience or device integration. There is room for more hardware and software companies in that network, he said. If some other company were to come out with a an open device, he would see that as a success for the project, even though it might be a competitor to Vivaldi.

Human-centric experience

The MPL philosophy is one of "human-centric experience" rather than the "app-centric experience" offered by other mobile OS vendors (e.g. Google and Apple). Vivaldi and other MPL devices are meant to be usable from the outset and not require the purchase of a lot of apps. That limits the "app store story" a bit, but it makes for a more compelling device. When he puts a Vivaldi tablet into people's hands, they start immediately talking about how they want to use it, Seigo said.

He noted that while tech pundits have written off the tablet market as a two-horse race, they are not seeing the full picture because MPL devices will not be competing in the same space. "If tech pundits were food critics, they would be fired," he said. He likened the way pundits looked at things to a food critic who said that French food is just great, so "Italian food will never sell". Once devices start shipping, "we'll do just fine", because MPL is not competing in the same space as iPad and Android.

When asked about where an interested person might be able to find paying work on the MPL project, Seigo noted that some of the partners have been employing people to work on it, as has his company, Coherent Theory LLC. That model is not sustainable in the long term, but once devices start shipping, there will be more money available for that kind of thing. There are volunteers as well, of course; "not everything is done for money", he said.

Enlisting aid from KDE developers and other interested people was one of the themes of Seigo's talk. Much has been accomplished, but there is lots still to be done. MPL needs "more people who care" to "join us and make this a reality". He and others are committed to making open devices available, with some help they can get there faster.

[ The author would like to thank KDE e.V. for travel assistance to Tallinn for Akademy. ]