Nokia and open source - a trial by fire

A blog, quoting significantly from Andrew Wafaa - developer of the doomed Smeegol openSUSE/MeeGo "respin" - explores Nokia's experience with open source, from Symbian and Maemo through to MeeGo: Maemo, which was begun as far back as 2005, was a relative success, but was targeted at a virtuous but limited 'geek' market. Between its launch on the first internet tablet, the 770, and its last appearance on the N900, the Maemo community had resolved most of the issues it had been asked to address. Within its own terms, Maemo was an unqualified success, but that wasn't enough. A small and focused team, given the job of refining the APIs and user interface, might have brought a competitive smartphone to market, but the Maemo community was instead asked to switch from Gtk to Qt, and then to merge Maemo with Moblin to form MeeGo, and then, on the eve of launch late last year was asked to re-write again, this time using QML instead of custom Qt based widgets – and the impetus was lost. Carsten Munk, team lead for the MeeGo N900 adapatation project, disagrees with the tone and the content of many of the points. Indeed, as Andrew Wafaa was primarily involved in Moblin and MeeGo Netbook ports, he is an unlikely choice to comment so extensively on Nokia's open source experiences.