Reply
Thread Tools
qgil's Avatar
Posts: 3,105 | Thanked: 11,088 times | Joined on Jul 2007 @ Mountain View (CA, USA)
#51
Originally Posted by timwatt View Post
My concerns would be:
- invalidating warranty by gaining root access to the device.
Gaining root access will be as documented and officially supported in MeeGo as it is on Maemo 5. I'mm not a lawyer but I guess your warranty validity depends on what you do to your device with such root access. In case of doubt you can reflash and go back to the initial state, both in Maemo 5 and MeeGo.

- inability to install .deb files (worse controlling the app market)
??? Let's see what is the situation with rpm/deb in MeeGo but in any case the choice of packaging system doesn't affect the openness of the platform. debs can be converted in rpms and viceversa. (also what do you mean about "controlling the app market", MeeGo gives the freedom to anybody to run their own MeeGo compatible app catalogs).

- limiting community support by deviating from a standard Linux distro. Making it more difficult to port existing Linux apps.
??? MeeGo is a project hosted by the Linux Foundation and I expect the Linux Standard base and freedesktop.org standards to be high priorities. Can you please give examples of Linux apps being more difficult to be ported to MeeGo?

- restricting little hacks like adding brightness controller to the phone menu or making an app that pauses media player when you pull the headphones out.
??? MeeGo's UX reference layer will be open source, so in fact people willing to tweak the system UI will have an easier life. "an app that pauses media player when you pull the headphones out" exists in Maemo 5 and I don't see why couldn't exist in MeeGo. Besides, MeeGo comes together with an OBS based infrastructure allowing anybody to create customized images.

In essence if a conflict such as: Nokia and Intel decide it is not in there commercial interest to support "say" the .ogg format (for example). With meamo it is open enough that the community could support .ogg, and Nokia would let it be.
MeeGo is no different than Maemo 5 in this sense. It's an open platform.

Also fwiw Speex is already supported in Maemo 5 and Vorbis + FLAC are officially supported in Harmattan. Moblin has been supporting Ogg codecs since day 1 afaik.

A concern I have and it may be out of ignorance: with MeeGo is Nokia and Intel may not leave those types of conflicts open to the community to solve, but they would take an active role in securing there commercial interest at the expense of the progress the community would bring.
What are "those types of conflicts"? No matter what they are, I expect MeeGo being a more open project where the community agendas have more chances to get in the platform roadmap compared to Maemo 2005-2010.

I hope these answers help discerning founded concerns from involuntary FUD.
 

The Following 12 Users Say Thank You to qgil For This Useful Post:
felbutss's Avatar
Posts: 579 | Thanked: 286 times | Joined on Oct 2009 @ Australia
#52
all in all. MeeGo for N900?. thats the hidden message in every question i see.
 
Posts: 352 | Thanked: 231 times | Joined on Jul 2008 @ Vancouver
#53
Originally Posted by qgil View Post
Linux apps being more difficult to be ported to MeeGo?
here I am just thinking of palm and Android, you can call them Linux but for a consumer like me it may be Linux at the core but the app layer is proprietary and restricts assess or openness preventing me form exploiting the fact that it is built on an open core.

Originally Posted by qgil View Post
What are "those types of conflicts"?
Despite Ogg being supported by the community, Nokia apposed the Use of Ogg formats in HTML5 as it left a few unresolved issues with DRM. Despite Nokia commercial interest they left meamo open (I see OGG may possibly be sported in the maemo OS now, just not promoted as an open standard by Nokia). I see meamo as an exemplary example where Nokia sport an open principal.

for me it looks like MeeGO is a good fit as it give Nokia some lead into a diversified market and it gives Intel an opportunity to build the hardware backbone for that market. the logical deduction is Nokia expect to sell more stuff and Intel expect to sell more chips for that stuff. My question is more like: if you make the commitment to openness as long as you use Intel hardware how open is it? at what point to you step in a control MeeGo if it's Openness starts to affect your bottom line?

i guess you could summarize my concern as: I see maemo is an interesting experiment, and the the outcome i envision is true progress with Nokia at the crest of that wave. Now i think it has an albatross around it's neck and it is limited by Intel and if it is a success its limited by the dependence on a hardware monopoly.
 
Posts: 4,556 | Thanked: 1,624 times | Joined on Dec 2007
#54
Originally Posted by qgil View Post
MeeGo brings more application developement attention sooner to the N900 and brings also a more solid platform able to deal with several types of devices.

So really, whatever N900 users had last week has improved significantly with the launch of MeeGo. If you think this is not true please explain why.
What I'm wondering is what's the lifeline of QT support for the N900 (assuming if it isn't updated onto the Meego path). Sure right now Meego and Maemo 5 will both be using QT 4.6. But what happens when 4.7 comes out, and so on. Will newer QT versions be backported to the N900 ensuring application compatibility?

I know you probably can't answer that (whether it's because you don't know or can't answer it). But it's just a thought.
__________________
Originally Posted by ysss View Post
They're maemo and MeeGo...

"Meamo!" sounds like what Zorro would say to catherine zeta jones... after she slaps him for looking at her dirtily...
 
Posts: 37 | Thanked: 34 times | Joined on Aug 2009 @ USA
#55
This is typical of the Linux community. Linux people are great at starting things and terrible at finishing them. I would guess that greater than 99% of all Linux apps have not reached a 1.0 version. Linux people like to sit around and talk and start new projects with all kinds of talk but when it comes to walking the talk they all drift away and find some new idea to pursue.
 
Posts: 367 | Thanked: 47 times | Joined on Nov 2008 @ Brooklyn, NY
#56
Originally Posted by Bruce Forsberg View Post
This is typical of the Linux community. Linux people are great at starting things and terrible at finishing them. I would guess that greater than 99% of all Linux apps have not reached a 1.0 version. Linux people like to sit around and talk and start new projects with all kinds of talk but when it comes to walking the talk they all drift away and find some new idea to pursue.
Ouch! Now there's a harsh statement. Despite all the times I pondered about the same thing, I greatly disagree with you. Sure there are many people trying different things and many of them their projects don't get to the maturity they expected when started but, without these people and their effords linux would not be where it is today with major distributions and all the applications that we come to love and use everyday. If anything, we can only be thankful that these people exist. Otherwise we would just let big corporations do whatever they want and there be no innovations.
__________________
Palmtx, N810 dual booting Maemo4 to sd and Mer0.15
 

The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to FRZ For This Useful Post:
ysss's Avatar
Posts: 4,384 | Thanked: 5,524 times | Joined on Jul 2007 @ ˙ǝɹǝɥʍou
#57
Originally Posted by Bruce Forsberg View Post
This is typical of the Linux community. Linux people are great at starting things and terrible at finishing them. I would guess that greater than 99% of all Linux apps have not reached a 1.0 version. Linux people like to sit around and talk and start new projects with all kinds of talk but when it comes to walking the talk they all drift away and find some new idea to pursue.
What's considered 'finished' in the commercial world is different to what 'finished' mean when you're coding something to scratch a particular itch.

You don't need to think about packaging and polish as much as when you're trying to sell products to other people and make it as accessible as possible to users of all levels.
__________________
Class .. : Power User
Humor .. : [#####-----] | Alignment: Pragmatist
Patience : [###-------] | Weapon(s): Galaxy Note + BB Bold Touch 9900
Agro ... : [###-------] | Relic(s) : iPhone 4S, Atrix, Milestone, N900, N800, N95, HTC G1, Treos, Zauri, BB 9000, BB 9700, etc

Follow the MeeGo Coding Competition!
 

The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to ysss For This Useful Post:
danramos's Avatar
Posts: 4,672 | Thanked: 5,455 times | Joined on Jul 2008 @ Springfield, MA, USA
#58
Originally Posted by qgil View Post
MeeGo is no different than Maemo 5 in this sense. It's an open platform.

Also fwiw Speex is already supported in Maemo 5 and Vorbis + FLAC are officially supported in Harmattan. Moblin has been supporting Ogg codecs since day 1 afaik.
I'm glad you said that. Timwatt may be going to the deep end of the cynicism pool, but I'm not sure I can blame him for asking some assurances. Myself, I want to know why Nokia had decided to act hypocritical to what they repeatedly preached about open-source.

What was that bruhaha that made everyone roll their eyes when Nokia regaled the world on how evil ogg was?

In case you forgot:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176#c33

Here's a pretty good summary:
Nokia has filed a submission with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) objecting to the use of Ogg Theora as the baseline video standard for the Web. Ogg is an open encoding scheme (On2, the company that developed it, gave it and a free, perpetual unlimited license to its patents to the nonprofit Xiph foundation), but Nokia called it "proprietary" and argued for the inclusion of standards that can be used in conjunction with DRM, because "from our viewpoint, any DRM-incompatible video related mechanism is a non-starter with the content industry (Hollywood). There is in our opinion no need to make DRM support mandatory, though."
Quoted from:
http://boingboing.net/2007/12/09/nok...3c-ogg-is.html

Here's Nokia's whitepaper on the evils of ogg:
http://www.w3.org/2007/08/video/positions/Nokia.pdf

I'm just hammering this in because we WERE told that these tablets were all about being OPEN.. OPEN.. OPEN.. the whole time. Once again, we're being told Meego is going to be OPEN. Is this going to be some creative expression of 'OPEN' again or are the customers finally going to be delivered the openness we were marketed way back when these were still Internet Tablets? I've been left unimpressed so far, so.. impress us, please, and assure us that Nokia doesn't repeat the same dumb ogg affair.

Edit: PS - And I don't mean ogg in particular, here. I'm speaking more toward open standards all-around and truly and fully open-sourcedness in Meego. None of this half-assed implementation of stuff that is clearly supported in everyone else's distributions and then the driver/hardware fiasco of implementing it properly and fully (like, say, when ogg couldn't be implemented with DSP support before... thanks for making us wait so long for that, too, btw). Bitter? yeah.

Last edited by danramos; 2010-05-27 at 22:57.
 

The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to danramos For This Useful Post:
qgil's Avatar
Posts: 3,105 | Thanked: 11,088 times | Joined on Jul 2007 @ Mountain View (CA, USA)
#59
Aren't you confusing "being open" with "putting the open source software I wish out of the box"?

The discussion about Ogg always was about Nokia "having to" ship it in the sales packages, not about the devices being open enough or not to play Ogg files.

Anyway, the fact related to the topic of this thread is that the MeeGo project will have a process where anybody has the possibility to influence the roadmap and content of the official releases.

Then vendors might end up offering more open or more closed implementations in their end products. As a user you can decide with your wallet which vendors do the right thing with MeeGo according to your parameters.

I still think that Nokia will keep releasing some o the most open devices based on MeeGo. Then again, Nokia does not attempt to beat the world mark of openness. For the MeeGo Devices team at Nokia open platforms and devices are means contributing to the real goal: better products released more efficiently getting community feedback and involvement + platforms for experimentation so you can then have more options to see interesting experimentation and productize it.

PS: I'm not trying to impress you with this post.
 

The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to qgil For This Useful Post:
danramos's Avatar
Posts: 4,672 | Thanked: 5,455 times | Joined on Jul 2008 @ Springfield, MA, USA
#60
Clearly.

The lack of dedication toward providing open drivers and only using open-source friendly components in what is advertised as an open-source friendly device does not instill confidence in choosing a Nokia product over anyone else's product--particularly to an audience for which you claim the goal is to obtain involvement and to allow experimentation and, ultimately, productization.

I'm not sure that you made it clear that drivers (hell, even whether the Nokia-made software itself) is going to be entirely open. The OGG example was an excellent one only because it was obvious to anyone and everyone that Nokia was claiming something factually incorrect and, incidentally, overtly insane as a reason for a move toward what seemed more like an agenda to promote more closed-source to the open-source crowd. A Nokia exec was even quoted as having said that Linux people need to learn business and accept DRM in Linux--as a reason to exclude OGG. That seems both irrelevant and hypocritical.

I think most people to whom an open-sourced product would appeal to--especially the crowd that would provide feedback, involve themselves and experiment, would not appreciate this sly psychological slight of hand to try to get people to accept a little less freedom in their product.

But, as you said, we can vote with our dollars. I wholly agree with that sentiment and I continue to wait for a better, more open product and remain unimpressed with my Nokia experience so far. I hope that MeeGo and the next Nokia device will ultimately impress me more than your post.
 

The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to danramos For This Useful Post:
Reply


 
Forum Jump


All times are GMT. The time now is 05:05.