OSiM World – Maemo DevSesh slides
Long time no blog, and this is not even a proper blog post yet. It will come once I’m back from this Maemo intensive week in Berlin. OSiM World 2008 is now history, here you have the slides Erkko Anttila (Fremantle product manager) and me presented yesterday (PDF).
Good news to Meta Tracker, PulseAudio, gUPnP, Ohm and Upstart fans! We are working a lot integrating and improving these fresh, young and powerful technologies in Maemo, and this is just the beginning.
Good news also for the friends of free software since some Nokia proprietary components are now open source (remarkably the WLAN driver and DSME), new components are being released with the aim of gathering community interest (a media application framework, a calendar framework and lt me tell you that a high-def camera framework is also in its way).
And of course good news also for the Maemo community since basically we are telling them that Nokia would like to see maemo.org fully emancipated by the time Fremantle goes out as Maemo 5.
None of these steps would have been possible without the excellent work a lot of people and organizations are doing – I personally hope that Nokia and specifically the Maemo Software team produces stuff equally useful to others.
And now… let me get a shower and go start the first Maemo Summit ever. 214 registered participants!
Filed under: maemo | 6 Comments
otoh
flors 
I’d love to see some more convergence & synergy between maemo and openmoko and between maemo and debian. Perhaps even maemo being fully merged into Debian and those Nokia devices solely using Debian.
If you can genuinely get Freemantle alpha builds out to the community every week – and I don’t mean Sardine type builds, as Sardine was a waste of time/effort for anyone who tried to install it – then you may have a hope of rekindling the community involvement and interest that this project so desperately needs. If you can do this, I’ll take my hat off to you.
Unfortunately we’ve heard it all so many times before from Nokia – “Release early, release often” – but it’s never happened to date which has left the community operating in a boom & bust mode, lurching from one release to another every 6 months or so, generally with a sense of disappointment at the lack of any real progress (particularly in terms of UI) apparent in each release.
If you can get alpha builds out to us that we can install on our devices – ideally without trashing an existing Diablo Release installation (ie. Freemantle alphas should install to external Flash memory with support for multi-boot, thus coexisting with a Diablo installation) then your feedback will go through the roof and Nokia can avoid the mistakes that have blighted previous releases.
In addition the increased openness will see more developers willing to participate in improving the alpha builds, assuming patches will be accepted by Nokia. The recent announcements sound good, let’s see if the execution can match it.
hi my friend. all this wanna say that soon will see UME for nokia 810?
I hope that we can have more software and options for our tPC
Good Job, Congrats
Hi Quim! Good to know that the summit is going prety well. The name is ‘GUPnP’ btw. 🙂 Don’t be misguided by the logo. 🙂
Fremantle looks nice – from the little us as outsiders can make of it. Sounds cool. However, like I mentioned on Stormy’s blog, I really felt burnt with Maemo and Nokia’s tablets in the past. It always feels like way too little, way too late.
I welcome the moves to make Maemo more open, but it’ll take quite a while still before outside developers can feel like they can participate. As long as it’s a closed platform, I might as well direct my attention and efforts to more popular and complete closed platforms like the iPhone.
I’ll try to be more constructive, and maybe suggest a few things which might help us take an interest in Maemo again:
– open hardware – the 770 for instance is still without WLAN drivers
– better software stack (UI/3D/Multimedia/…) – that’s where Fremantle comes in I suppose
– what @foo said: a distro like approach. It would be nice if there was one distro for all, and that over time improvements are automatically available to all (without reflashing of course). Outside developers would be able to deliver software without having to worry about dependencies (“will our soft run on Gregale/Bora/Chinook 770/800/810/…?”)
– the distro approach would also allow outside developers to take up responsability for a (small?) set of packages and actually get involved. Right now it seems non-Nokians have very little input on the direction and roadmap of Maemo. It all has a Deus-ex-machina feel to it, that the unwashed masses should be grateful for. Participating with Openmoko, Openembedded, Angstrom, etc might also really pay off.
Sorry for ranting (too much text already – I’ll stop now, promise ^_^)