MeeGo & Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit write-up

The ever-excellent LWN covers the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which was held in San Francisco just over a week ago. In addition to a MeeGo workshop, the Maemo community was represented by Ryan Abel and Randall Arnold. Jake Edge describes how both Ari Jaaksi (Nokia) and Imad Sousou (Intel) gave keynotes: Ari Jaaksi, Nokia's VP for Maemo devices and MeeGo operations, spoke first, which he saw as an advantage because Intel's Imad Sousou would be sure to correct anything he said "wrong". The goal of the MeeGo project is to "provide industry with an open platform" for various kinds of devices. Both companies have been working on mobile distributions, which means that they "integrate the same components multiple times", and that is "stupid", Jaaksi said. That is one of the main ideas behind the merger. Numerous times during the keynotes, these senior figures described the development as happening in the open. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. There's an open Bugzilla, an open IRC channel and a code dump which has been "thrown over the wall". Real open development would have architectural discussions about the integration of various components happening on the meego-dev mailing list; it'd have the building of the first release (whether for the N900 or netbooks) happening in the open, with nightly integration builds; it'd have build plans on OBS open and available for others to inspect.

This has been noticed by the community and was raised during Wednesday's Technical Steering Group (TSG) meeting - on which Imad sits. The minutes are linked to later in this issue, but an underlying tone of "you can't expect things to change overnight" will remind many in the Maemo community, at least, of a familiar refrain from Nokia during the earlier days of Maemo. Valtteri Halla, the other member of the TSG, has encouraged everyone in the community to continue pushing for more openness.

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Hopefully, if you're reading this, you find the weekly issues of MWKN of some value. The original intent of the digest was that by crowdsourcing content from throughout the Maemo (and now MeeGo) sphere, the responsibility of finding all relevant content wouldn't fall on the shoulders of a few individuals. However, we have a problem, in that there are only a very limited number of people who are regularly contributing to MWKN; with over two thirds of the articles being found by your editor. The contributors we have are very valued, and their contributions - whether highly numerous; of high quality; or both - are much appreciated.

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