Weird, since almost all the people I met during the conference were very excited about MeeGo and it's possibilities. The guy seems to be spreading misinformation. Seems like just another worthless small time tech blogger trying to score some hits to me.

That would be Andrew "Jaffa" Flegg.

Well, judging by his general attitude in the article, I'm starting to wonder a bit if the negative part of the talks was from his side. He also confuses WeTab for being MeeGo, which it hardly is. Entire UX is self-made.

I think the conference was great. It was a good mix of open source community feeling with industry representatives trying to do things in the MeeGo way of working (Transparency, Inclusion, Meritocracy, Upstream first philosophy).

An example of this was the ARM BoF (which I ran). At the same table different ARM vendors sat and discussed together, openly, about MeeGo in ARM and regarding their devices. Also sat there, hobbyists hacking MeeGo onto those vendor's boards - discussing future directions and industry problems.

At another table people discussed SDK/Developer story problems (OBS), another table some discussed release engineering and kernel developers got together to discuss directions as well.

I feel there was a good open-minded and community spirit in the air. The same is seen in our IRC channels where people even between competitors help with their components / area's of expertise.

That said - you'd have to be a Hurd fanboy to not doubt a little bit about progress and the platform quality and direction. It's a sign of health.

But things are looking damn good in terms of support and industry backing.

In short ? No. Honestly, I don't really see his points either (okay, the U2 thing is subjective, I'll give him that), but I guess that's because I'm biased I would also say he does not really "get" industry-backed open development (I mean, by his 'logic' the Linux kernel or Apache would also only be of interest to Stallman-type geeks...). As for developers - I guess it depends with whom you hung out with - of course I would guess people from the other side of the atlantic would be statistically more inclined to have doubts about Nokia given mindshare and past market focus. Personally I talked to a lot of people (not counting Nokia or Intel hats) most of whom were pretty enthusiastic, or at the very least hopeful. Granted, no device is no device, but Android (and the ecosystem) weren't born in six months and neither will/was MeeGo (nor will it take over the world with one device whether that be the WeTab or something else). My key message to this dude (and many developers) is that there will be a learning process to understand what open development means (and no, "If I don't get it then it has to be crap" is not a logical argument). Those with purely commercial backgrounds (yes, Android counts as such regardless of how it brands itself), both developers and users will be bewildered by the idea that they can actually see and take part in the forming of a platform and there will be some 'nobody told me I should not put a cat in the microwave' or 'what do you mean the most expensive type of coffee comes from cat poo', but it's the end result that counts. The fact is that there is no (both horizontal and vertical) industry-wide Linux standard and that's what MeeGo is aiming for (no, really, Android for all intents and purposes is NOT and is not RUN (!) as Linux - WinMo would have won long ago if the Google approach worked for horizontal markets). Thus thinking of MeeGo in terms of 'will the next device beat the Nexus/Droid/insert_random' is extremely short sighted (which doesn't imply it cannot beat it ! ). But again, as said, I'm biased so take this with a grain of salt - just as the commentary of that armchair analyst

But WeTab is MeeGo, right? (CamelCaseGalore!) AFAIK vendors can slap their own UI on top of MeeGo (as long as they provide the MeeGo APIs like Qt for third party developers) and it looks as if the upcoming handset UX from that handset vendor is also going to be vastly different than what we currently see as the handset UX reference implementation.

It's MeeGo-based but isn't MeeGo compliant, I believe and they can't use the trademark. There wasn't really a compliance model for 1.0 :/

What does MeeGo-compliance require?
The WeTab is clearly MeeGo with Qt and rpm package management and also with the /etc/meego-release file.

http://wiki.meego.com/Quality/Compliance

Yes, really (but I'll save the rants for another time).

The WeTab isn't compliant simply because there was no compliance spec for MeeGo 1.0. I guess they didn't expect people to actually use that release.

if any of you guys want to move to romania...
http://www.intel.com/jobs/jobsearch/...JobCategory=-1

Thanks for the pics. By that point in the evening, I actually felt that out of focus and fuzzy round the edges. Definitely too much Guinness.