Hurrian | # 31 | 2011-12-10, 14:01 | Report

Now, apparently, it'll be 100% open source (obviously excluding proprietary code such as the SGX driver), straight from the horse's mouth.

Who'll use it though? Maemo's a long-time open source project that no other device manufacturer used. Looks like it'll be the same for WebOS, unless HTC and Samsung and LG and Motorola etc. start pumping out WebOS 3 phones to unseat Android.

Even then, who'll buy it? Android has a staggering amount of apps while community stuff in Preware is crap compared to what we have in the repos, the games are available everywhere else, and the only thing going for it is that WebOS is nice to use.

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Last edited by Hurrian; 2011-12-10 at 14:04.

javispedro | # 32 | 2011-12-10, 15:05 | Report

No, I ran the full OS, except the kernel. And except Bluetooth, telephony.. the usual gang.


IMHO, the only thing I really wanted from webOS to be opensourced is Enyo, and that's exactly the only thing that has been confirmed 100% to be opensource (among other things, and to the best of my knowledge, because HP owns 100% of it, unlike the rest of webOS).

Having Enyo open means that you can run the standard webOS applications wherever you want, including a plain desktop webkit-based browser (this has been done already with Chrome...).

Mojo would also be nice, but it's slightly more tied to the webOS browser, aiui.

The rest of the OS is nice and good-looking, but Meego/Mer is a better distro IMHO. As for Luna, by now people have been doing better things using QML (think how easy it would be to replicate the card view in QML).

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Last edited by javispedro; 2011-12-10 at 15:08.

lma | # 33 | 2011-12-10, 15:07 | Report

Sorry but that's totally wrong. Maemo contained open source, but it was never an open source project per se, and was never available for third parties to licence either. Nevertheless some manufacturers did re-use some of the open bits like Hildon, and Nokia's reaction was along the lines of "OMG there are going to be cheap chinese devices using our code, what are we going to do" and ended up with closing all the user-facing stuff in Harmattan.

I did. I waited patiently for years for Nokia to make something decent again, and after I saw the closed, locked, crippled and stillborn N9 I opted for the lesser of two evils and spent my upgrade budget on a Pre 3[1]. You know what, it's much nicer than what it sounds like on paper, even before yesterday's announcement.

[1] And a touchpad. And touchstones, cases, capacitive styluses for both. And a bluetooth keyboard. And a couple dozen or so apps. And I still have plenty of cash left over compared to what an N9 would have cost :-p

attila77 | # 34 | 2011-12-10, 15:52 | Report

Simple - nobody bothered (I told this story a couple of times already). I personally made a 4.7 build nearly a year ago in just a couple of hours, but that (along with my dev env) sadly went down with a disk crash. Didn't have the inspiration to redo the thing as considering the state of the GLES drivers (and, well hardware design in general) of the N8x0, getting a performant Qt platform would require quite a bit of work*

*Trivia: The 25$ raspberry pi runs circles - no, planetary orbits around the N8x0 performance-wise

Depends on what the point of webOS is. To be a web-tech-friendly Linux base (in which case Qt makes a lot of sense), or just a vehicle for web apps (in which case it's no better than Tizen).

The Wizard of Huz | # 35 | 2011-12-11, 00:40 | Report

What is better about the WebOS way of doing multitasking? What is the difference between cards vs little windows? I sincerely would like to know.

I prefer the grid multitasking of Maemo over the Meego way or the cards system.

Edit: What percentage of Maemo is opensource?
And what percentage of Meego? Anybody know for sure? And are the closed bits necessary part or can they be made with reverse engineered?

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Last edited by The Wizard of Huz; 2011-12-11 at 00:54.

HtheB | # 36 | 2011-12-11, 01:34 | Report

Will you be working on this aswell?
If yes, THIS IS GREAT NEWS!

mattmers | # 37 | 2011-12-11, 03:24 | Report

I completely agree, for the last month I have debating which to buy, a N900 or a Pre 3. Pre 3 has better hardware but an uncertain future. N900 has a better os (personal opinion) but the hardware is starting to show its age. It would be cool for me to get a Pre 3 and see maemo on it. Finally, it seems that a lot of us like webos, so why don't we take it under our wing (maemo community) The N900 was never a commercial success but an underground one. I think the same can be said about the Pre 3.

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Last edited by mattmers; 2011-12-11 at 04:20.

lma | # 38 | 2011-12-11, 04:27 | Report

As long as we're comparing pears to tangerines, so does my dockstar that cost not much more than that over a year ago. The N810 however lives comfortably in my pocket and lets me deal with email, IM and ssh on the go so it wins by default ;-)

It's much more GNU/Linux-y than Android for sure, but it was never meant to be a generic Linux platform. For running web apps along with Qt (and whatever else) ones it would make more sense to port Enyo to another Linux distribution than trying to make Qt apps coexist under the webOS UI which is more or less (ok, I'm oversimplifying a bit) a glorified web page running in a full-screen browser window.

Oh, it's better than Tizen simply by virtue of actually existing :-)

Mike Fila | # 39 | 2011-12-11, 05:29 | Report

lol reading this thread i had a slight glimmer of hope of the possibility of seeing maemo on some new hardware ..then i looked at the pre 3 ...16g on board and no sd card ...knew it was too good to be true

lma | # 40 | 2011-12-11, 12:26 | Report

Why would you think that? It's not Maemo that's being opened!

That's the least of your problems. If you want to attempt moving Maemo (Fremantle I presume) to new hardware you should be looking for something OMAP3-based.