
Jolla promises MeeGo will live on, plans new smartphone to reward the faithful - shrikant
http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/07/jolla-promises-meego-will-live-on-plans-new-smartphone/
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bergie
I wrote down some lessons from the Maemo and MeeGo times in light of the Jolla
announcement. Long read but can give some perspective
<http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/meego-diaspora/>

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densh
I was really excited until they mentioned a rewrite in favor of "Html5". It's
really hard for me to understand why do sane people choose resource-hungry
technology to work on resource-constrained hardware despite existence of much
better alternatives (Qt) over and over again. This doesn't make any sense to
me. There will be performance issues for sure. The same way as they were with
WebOS which happily consumed 1GB of ram (Touchpad) when 256MB would be more
than enough for a native solution and could have provided a much better end-
used experience (Original iPad.)

WebOS heavily relies on Qt itself. Significant amount of internal
infrastructure is written using it. I can't understand why didn't they
officially provide Qt as a alternative way to write Apps for WebOS. It must
have been a political decision ("we are WebOS, not QtOS".)

Blackberry people are the ones who actually understood how good Qt actually is
for such kind of thing and they are pushing it now as the native toolkit.

Qt could have become a common denominator for mobile operating systems outside
of the Android/iOS world. It would have helped with shortage of applications
(as developers could have hypothetically wrote a very similar app for
Blackberry, MeeGo and WebOS at the same time) and would ease porting of
successful apps from iOS.

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bergie
Jolla is apparently basing their work on Mer, the community-managed mobile OS
core that emerged from the ashes of MeeGo: <http://merproject.org/>

Mer apparently runs both Qt/QML and HTML5 happily, so I don't see why this has
to be one or the other. The Cordia UX built on Mer even builds on GTK3.

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pm90
I really really really hope they do succeed. I have seen my friends N9 and its
an absolutely amazing phone....except that nobody (except hobbyist's) develop
for it

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nakkiel
I couldn't agree more. The phone is a good device and the OS is ready for
prime time.

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rbanffy
If they ever manage to launch a phone and become a threat to WP7, Nokia will
sue them out of existence.

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ajross
Sue them for using open source software that Nokia itself released? That
sounds amusing.

No, this is fine legally. What's more difficult is that huge chunks of "Nokia
MeeGo" (which is frustratingly different from "Intel MeeGo" in a lot of ways)
aren't actually open source. They released most of the middleware, but none of
the apps.

~~~
rbanffy
That's an interesting reasoning. I wonder how many patents Nokia has that will
be useless against Android because Nokia released MeeGo as open source.

Right now, I consider Nokia a tool for Microsoft to push Windows Phone onto
the market. Whether they consider this a distraction or a threat will be
evident by their reaction.

~~~
hollerith
Releasing software as open source does not invalidate patents. What happens is
that if the software infringes, then you cannot use it even though it is open
source.

~~~
rbanffy
ajross' reasoning didn't lead to full invalidation, but a patent Nokia cannot
use against Android or Linux is useless for Microsoft.

~~~
hollerith
You seem to believe that Nokia's having open-sourced some software confers on
users and re-distributors of that software some sort of protection against
Nokia's patents -- that certain behaviors that would have been infringement in
the absence of the open-source license are somehow no longer infringement. If
that is what you believe, I disagree.

Sometimes a corporation will grant a license of any patents need to run a
piece of open-source software -- IBM did that in the 1990s in regard to Linux
-- but I do not know of any open-source licenses that _incorporates_ such a
patent licensing. Certainly GPL 2 does not.

In other words, sometimes a patent holder will make a legally-binding promise
not to sue any user or re-distributor of an open-source software for patent
infringement, but all the open-source licenses I know restrict themselves to
_copyright_ and, to the first order, are silent on _patents_. (The
qualification "to the first order" is necessary because IIRC GPL 2 includes
language to the effect that if you try to use patents (or any other means --
but the language was added to address software patents) to discriminate among
the recipients of your GPLed "changes", you lose the right to re-distribute
the changes at all -- but note well that this language does not prevent a
contributor of some changes from using its patents to stop the re-distribution
of the changes altogether.)

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rbanffy
The GPLv2 provides an implicit patent license. Imagine you hold a patent and
publish some code that implements your patent under the GPLv2. Everyone who
gets the program from you is granted, by the GPL, the right to use it. In
order to use it, they'll need a license to your patent, which you can't deny
because of the GPL. The GPL also stipulates they can give this program to
other people, provided it is under the same terms. This grants downstream
users the same rights to use your patents your direct clients have.

I'd love to see this tested in court.

~~~
hollerith
>Imagine you hold a patent and publish some code that implements your patent
under the GPLv2. Everyone who gets the program from you is granted, by the
GPL, the right to use . . . your patent, which you can't deny because of the
GPL.

It is rare that one can say with certainty how a court will find, so let me
just point out that neither Eben Moglen nor the FSF agree with your position
as quoted above. To be exact, their position _as of the late 1990s_ (when I
studied the GPL) is the opposite of your position, and they are very unlikely
to have changed their position since then.

This will probably be my last reply to you.

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mikecane
It's the Harmattan UI that makes MeeGo on the N9 so gorgeous. I don't suppose
they can use that?

