
MeeGo - The fusion of Maemo and Moblin - ez77
http://meego.com/
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mortenjorck
The wave of amazed astonishment today at Microsoft actually announcing an
innovative mobile OS really should be shared with this.

"Fusing" Maemo and Moblin seems about as straightforward a process as merging
Android and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Sure, they're both based on a Linux kernel,
but... isn't that about all? They have entirely different UIs, different
software stacks, and are targeted at different classes of device.

Both Moblin and Maemo have looked very promising on their own, and I hope this
is the right decision for both of them. It just seems very strange for Intel
and Nokia to attempt this.

~~~
yungchin
It makes sense for Intel, because they want to get into the mobile market,
which is totally controlled by ARM. So getting Nokia's platform to be not only
ARM- but also Atom-compatible might get Intel a chance of entry.

I guess it technically makes less sense for Nokia. Maybe they just need
Intel's money, to be able to keep up with the pace of Android development.

~~~
andrewtj
For Nokia, I don't think it's anything to do with Android (in the narrow
sense) and is about far more than Intel's money. It seems to me that some
years back Nokia took the view that phones are just another computing
platform. Taking this view, actions like the Trolltech acquisition, Maemo, the
Booklet 3G and this announcement can be seen as one cohesive movement towards
Nokia offering the full computing stack.

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megaduck
This is a fantastic development for people who want a general purpose linux on
netbooks.

I've tried several times to use Moblin as my primary OS, and it's just too
half-baked and incomplete at this point. The browser is buggy, and email lacks
a lot of basic features. The network services are also unfinished or missing.
The calendar doesn't sync with google calendar, there's no facebook
integration, there's no address book synchronization. There's also a lot of
missing UI niceties.

What's frustrating about is that all of the infrastructure is there to have
those things. They've developed a nice abstraction layer for hooking into web
services, as well as a great UI toolkit for building slick-looking
applications on a small screen. They've also got awesome power management, and
an amazingly fast boot process. Moblin makes your little atom-based netbook
feel amazingly responsive.

My hunch is that Moblin has been building things from the 'bottom up', i.e.
power management, networking, display drivers, and tools. Maemo seems to have
the opposite approach, where they have a lot more UI polish and finished
applications, but they might not have the robust underlying infrastructure
code.

If both companies play to their strengths, then we might get a pretty nice
linux for small screens. If that happens, I'll jump ship from Ubuntu in a
heartbeat.

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mbreese
Isn't this where projects go to die? I'm not sure why companies think that
they can merge open source projects just like they are divisions in a company.

This seems like a last ditch effort to salvage some sort of market for both of
these projects. Neither really seemed to have much of a direction, so I
suspect that together they will really be able to go nowhere fast.

~~~
nitrogen
The fact that they call themselves the MeeGo Technical Steering Group seems to
confirm your conclusion.

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Tichy
Why can't they just tell me on the start page what they are. MeeGo,
SchmeeGo... I have no idea what this is about.

