Got MeeGo? OSCON Keynote by Dirk Hohndel

Today is the first day of the main OSCON event here in lovely Portland, Oregon, and we were fortunate to have a MeeGo presentation during the opening keynotes. Here is a brief summary of what Dirk Hohndel covered during his time on stage.

Dirk kicked off the keynote with his perspective on mobile computing to set the context for why projects like MeeGo are so interesting. He said that mobile computing has become so natural that we don't think about how special it is to have easy access to information in a form that is always connected and portable enough to be easily carried around wherever we go. However, the software we use for many mobile devices wasn't really designed for it, and scaled down desktop versions of software don't provide the best experience on smaller screen sizes. MeeGo is focused on providing the best possible user experience designed from the ground up to look great on a variety of small devices.

MeeGo came out of a realization by Nokia and Intel that they were both implementing very similar environments in Maemo and Moblin, which duplicated effort and wasted time and energy by working on those projects separately. We decided to combine Maemo and Moblin to create a platform that works across netbooks, handsets, connected TVs, in-vehicle infotainment systems, and more as a true open source community project under the Linux Foundation. MeeGo operates like most open source projects with maintainers, open source repositories, and a meritocracy that drives development of the platform with a governance model that starts with our Technical Steering Group. The Technical Steering Group meets in the open on IRC about twice a month, and we have multiple project groups also meeting regularly over IRC to work on various aspects of MeeGo.

In MeeGo, we want to create a full open source stack (more than just a Linux kernel) with all of the telephony components to give people complete open source phones, tablets and other devices. We work on a 6 month release cadence with releases in the spring and the fall, and our goal is to have a full phone stack in the fall release with everything open.

In order to make all of this work seamlessly, MeeGo is heavily focused on working with upstream projects. Open source isn't just about complying with the letter of the license - it's about engaging with upstream projects, becoming part of those communities and getting changes into those upstream projects so other people can use them. We don't want to fork the upstream projects (avoid the mistakes of Unix). By working closely together in multiple upstream communities, we can help make the whole stack better, instead of just improving the MeeGo project. We are focused on maintaining compatibility and sharing innovations back and forth between projects because this collaboration is critical to being a successful open source project.

You can download Dirk's entire presentation (pdf link) and join us to make MeeGo better and more successful!