Linux Foundation will not permit apps.meego.com

MeeGo is a project of The Linux Foundation, a non-profit organisation which "promotes, protects and standardizes Linux by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms". It provides the hosting and infrastructure for meego.com, as well as owning the overall governance structure and trademarks of the project.

apps.meego.com was to be the equivalent of maemo.org's Extras - a place for open source code to be available for multiple MeeGo devices, with a web-based frontend (and on-device client). For the last couple of weeks, the apps.meego.com team (that is, David Greaves and Niels Breet) have been working with the Community Office (Dawn Foster), the Technical Steering Group (Imad Sousou) and Linux Foundation representatives concerned over potential legal risks and issues with hosting apps.meego.com. Due to a lack of movement, David has publicised the issue:

The Linux Foundation have told us in private conversations that they will not permit apps.meego.com to be served from the MeeGo.com infrastructure hosted by them. They do not have the resource at this time to provide a statement giving their reasons. We can not assess what other services may be impacted in the future.

An alternative, apps.formeego.org has been given appropriate blessing and work is continuing on the apps.meego.com infrastructure - but with the intent of hosting the web-based frontend on apps.formeego.org instead. Nokia, as a large vendor with a MeeGo(ish) device on its way out, is partly sponsoring the requisite hardware, and is hoping that other parties interested in seeing a vibrant open source application ecosystem on MeeGo will also do the same. The service which would be building the source code, and hosting both that and the resulting binaries, the Community OBS, is currently believed not to be at risk - although David has noted the Linux Foundation's communications on the matter have been somewhat lacking.

Should, or could, "ForMeego.org" expand to solve many of the management problems of MeeGo?

As noted above, the Linux Foundation "own" MeeGo. However, neither they - nor the TSG - have been visible in trying to publicly work out a solution. Architecture decisions, quality assurance processes and many other facets of the project are also problematic to see transparency in. This led to a discussion on IRC about potentially expanding "ForMeeGo.org" to encompass all the aims of the N9x0 Community Edition, to be a reference vendor and be a "downstream" of MeeGo Core.

This would effectively isolate all the problems to one or more upstream projects, allowing hardware manufacturers to realise the true potential of MeeGo, that of a differentiatable ecosystem-in-a-box. Manufacturers would be able to take "ForMeeGo.org"'s deliverables, its ecosystem of open source applications and build a unique user interface on top of it. A few choice quotes:

Maybe we could set up a ForMeeGo organisation & council ;-)

the only place the project really works is on the factory floor, management seems missing and invisible

I'd rather see a restructure than a fork. But yeah, things like not having an active TSG, invisible working groups etc, doesn't give a good impression atm.

A restructure/fix of The MeeGo Project requires the participation of those leading the project.

Carsten Munk said, on Twitter, in response to this discussion "you know management is causing bad effects when forking out of frustration seems acceptable". Hopefully, the project leadership will put in place mechanisms to solve these problems (or the appearance of them) within the existing project.

Restructure MeeGo - thoughts on getting some direction

Following on from the above discussion, David Greaves posted some draft blog posts he'd had kicking around for a while: I've just published a series of articles that reflect my thoughts on improving MeeGo and setting some directon. [...] Whilst the MeeGo Project has the potential to be incredibly beneficial to the Linux device market it can and must do more to fulfill that aspiration. MeeGo is in danger of becoming "Yet Another Linux Distro". As with any venture; in order to succeed MeeGo must first identify and focus on satisfying its customers. Identification is not too hard : organisations involved in building devices based on MeeGo.