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OSiM News -- What's up with Maemo?

From http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/2008/09/osim-news-whats

Posted on 2008-09-16 18:54:00 UTC.

I had a presentation at the OSiM conference in Berlin today. I discussed about the future of the Maemo software.

Bringing open source to consumer mainstream

Nokia operates in two worlds:
a) in a product and business world manufacturing and selling devices and services
b) in an open source –even in a free software world—participating in many projects and peer development groups

The open source and the corporate world used to be very different. But now they overlap more and more each day. This closeness provides very interesting opportunities, but also challenges. Our vision is to bring the innovation, quality and end user participation into consumer mainstream. Our vision is a fruitful and beneficial collaboration.

Photo: Ian McKellar

A suit -- a t-shirt

So the suits and the hackers! For the suits I have one warning. We have no product announcements today. And for the hackers, we are not educating anybody here, not even the Linux community. But I’ve got a good story to tell.

Maemo

Maemo.org is an open source project, sponsored and contributed by Nokia. It is both for the application developers and for the platform developers providing a means to work together.

Nokia uses Maemo.org as the foundation of its own Maemo software that currently fuels Nokia’s Internet Tablets, such as N800 and N810. Maemo is the first mobile project that takes the Linux desktop paradigm to mobile devices. I’d claim that Nokia essentially created the Mobile Internet Devices (MID) category with the Nokia 770. It included several internet centric applications, such as the desktop browser and VoIP and IM services, as opposite of PDA or Phone centric applications, such as PIM or telephony apps. And it was based on GNOME and Linux. And it was all about the touch screen from the very beginning.

A preview of the 5th Release

Maemo software evolution has progressed through 4 releases. It has powered several multimedia computers, such as the Nokia N810. It is now a time to introduce some of the future directions for the Maemo software.

The 5th release will include cellular connectivity for the High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) data. Maemo already supports WLAN, Bluetooth and WIMAX. With HSPA we can now build use cases for wireless broadband anywhere.

Maemo will enable more computing power by running on OMAP3 processors . OMAP3 enables laptop-like performance and advanced entertainment capabilities. It is based on the ARM® Cortex™-A8 superscalar microprocessor core.

Maemo platform will include support for high definition camera sensors. This enables new multimedia use cases such as instant photo tagging and sharing.

And like before, Maemo remains to be one of Nokia’s software options for Internet optimized multimedia computers.

The Linux Foundation

Nokia becomes Gold Sponsor of the Linux Foundation . Linux and open source is becoming more and more important to Nokia. Thus, increasing our contribution to the Linux Foundation and to the Linux kernel is a self-evident step for Nokia.

It is good to notice how well our goals are aligned already. Nokia’s vision is to bring open source and Linux to consumer mainstream. The Linux Foundation expresses its goals by saying:

...For Linux to remain open and attain the greatest ubiquity possible, important services must be provided, including legal protection, standardization, promotion and collaboration. The Linux Foundation has been founded to help close the gap between open source and proprietary platforms, while sustaining the openness, freedom of choice and technical superiority inherent in open source software.

As many of you know, we have been active in several open source projects, including the Linux kernel. Nokia has become today the first to contribute code on HSPA cellular connectivity for OMAP3 processor to Linux kernel.

Work in upstream is the way to contribute to community also in cellular connectivity area. It is our core way of working! As in most work with upstream projects, we start bottom up with our contribution. The first code on HSPA cellular connectivity was made public in the last 24 hours.

Later on, we intend to contribute to the Linux kernel the SSI (Synchronous Serial Interface) hardware driver for OMAP3, and the power management, link layer protocol, and the network layer protocol for the modem according to Nokia specs. Let’s work together!

Software Developed with the Community

Maemo.org community is the open source community that innovates on top and within the Maemo platform. We invite innovation not only on top of the platform but also into the platform as an experimental lab for innovations.

Maemo community has over 13.000 members today and works on over 600 projects. It is probably the biggest open source community for mobile Linux. As a part of the Maemo work, Nokia contributes to many other upstream open source projects such as GNOME/GTK+, Linux kernel, Debian, Gstreamer, Telepathy, etc. Nokia will shift more and more of its R&D work into open source mode to avoid forking.

Maemo Summit

Meet you soon there! Almost 200 participants and growing – just around the corner here in Berlin.

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