We say that the Nokia N900 running Maemo 5 is a computer. It is a computer in your pocket. What an earth do we mean? Let me try to explain what I think. This is my interpretation.

Getting close now!!

It was cool to see the Maemo Summit participants playing with N900s. For those of you who still need to wait for a while (yes, my fault ...) check out the new videos from our UI team.


We are working like maniacs to get the N900 finalized. I'm so proud of the Nokia teams in India, US, and Finland working hard on Maemo 5 .... and already equally hard on Maemo 6. And I'm also very happy to see the Maemo community efforts getting cool stuff on and inside the Maemo platform.

People speculate now if N900 is a smartphone, or a computer, or a some kind of a killer of another phone --- you know. I understand that people want to compare N900 to other devices, but it's like comparing apples and oranges. Literally. N900 does many things better than any other device I know, some features could be improved, and some tricks it cannot do at all. So you better check it out and form your own opinion.

Those of you who know me know that I'm a bit of a petrol head. So for me my N900 is a bit like my Alfa Romeo. It can be almost anything -- but boring it ain't!



...and, life is simply too short to drive boring cars. But that's another story .....

We had a good few days @ Nokia world in Stuttgart. Nokians, journalist, analysts, partners, operators, Maemo.org dudes, etc. I received overwhelmingly positive feedback from people once they saw a N900 in action. But then again, I do not know what they talked behind my back.

Or actually I do. Very positive comments also in various blogs and articles. People understand what we are doing and they like the product.

It is all about
1) Internet (browsing, chatting, sharing, talking ....) first
2) Open source & collaborative development for consumers
3) True computer experience in a small package

Alan has a nice story @ maemo.org.

Nice buzz ;-)

We have a tough last mile to finalize the N900 for the sales start. The Maemo team is working very hard and I'm so proud of it! Thus, I want to say a few words about how we build the Maemo devices. We do it as a part of the community in upstream projects, maemo.org projects, and internal hardware and software development, finalizing, and releasing.



Upstream projects
The most significant part of this joint development happens in upstream communities, such as kernel.org, Mozilla, and Gnome. Hundreds of individuals are participating the development and this is what creates the foundation of the Maemo platform.

Maemo is based on the world's most significant open source components. It is build with the community. I've said some time ago that our vision is to bring open source to consumers. That is what is happening right now.

Maemo.org
While working within these upstream projects, we have maemo.org as the Maemo community. It provides a means for developers to discuss, contribute, follow up, praise&complain, and be part of the Maemo evolution. The Maemo community has over 16.000 registered members that contribute to more than 700 development projects. Is it the largest community of mobile open source developers? We as Nokia sponsor it but it is governed by the community council.

Nokia Maemo team
The Nokia team runs device development programs, such as the N900 program, and software programs, such as the Fremantle software program as a part of the Maemo Devices. Software programs and the roadmap are communicated and discussed openly within the maemo.org. Device programs are Nokia secrets before days like this Thursday.

The Nokia programs utilize the work from upstream projects, maemo.org work and Nokia internal R&D. They finalize the software and hardware, and create an open source based user experience that -- I hope -- people will love the way I do.

Don't think that this is a simple engine to run! In addition of getting the most significant parts of the code from community projects, the Nokia Maemo team has a huge job to develop, finalize, optimize, fine tune, test, and integrae the devices into ready packages. The work varies from bootloaders to UI widgets, from power management to graphical elements.

In addition to the open source projects, the Maemo team works intimately with external companies providing components and technology to Maemo devices. Texas Instruments, Adobe, Ebay/Skype to name a few.

Summary

Great user experience through open source. Excitement in the air. The community development in the core.

This really made my day: A reason to get up in the morning by Philip.

Ifeel good. It is now publicly announced. See www.maemo.nokia.com.
More to follow.

See you at Nokia World, Maemo Summit and OSIM.

We are living interesting times. The current economical situation has made things change faster. The whole mobile world is changing. New players are entering and old players are changing or disappearing.

There is now less time and energy for games, politics and religion in the tech world. For all of us who are in this for the long run -- we all need to get products and services out to consumers ASAP. For us, the key is collaboration.

As a part of our strategy in Maemo, we collaborate with many partners. We work closely with the Mozilla foundation and the Linux foundation. We work in several open source projects such as Gnome, Qt, X and so forth. In addition we work with several industry partners, such as Texas Instruments, who provide us with the underlying technology for the existing Maemo products.

And today we announced that we collaborate with Intel inside several new and established open source projects. This is the kind of upstream collaboration we've been talking about. We say: "Intel and Nokia are coordinating their Open Source technology selection and development investments for Maemo and Moblin. This means alignment behind a range of key Open Source technologies for Mobile Computing such as: oFono, ConnMan, Mozilla, X.Org, BlueZ, D-BUS, Tracker, GStreamer, PulseAudio. "
We both feel that it makes a lot of sense to collaborate and direct key investments to the same direction. It allows us both to contribute mature technology to same open source projects – and not fragment the industry.
All this is needed to create new interesting products and services.

It's been a while.

One guy just told me he's reading my blog. I guess I better start writing ...

Let me spam this time with two topics only:

Look at Qt opened up. Pretty cool. You can see the work in progress.

Look at Maemo and Moblin work. oFono.org is a place to design an infrastructure for building mobile telephony (GSM/UMTS) applications.

Qt will be available under LGPL and repositories will be publicly available. We invite contributions ... so the development process will open up too.

This will make Qt a very interesting platform. It is now truly open, cross platform, and technically very advanced.

Many people had already earlier an opinion that Qt is technically very advanced, flexible and powerful. It was only the licensing and the development model that was wrong. Now, that’s fixed.

Component level

Open source adds transparency. It provides a very practical means to access and share code, work together with others, and design and implement software in a collaborative manner. When code is licensed under a copyleft license, there is also a guarantee that nobody can mess it up! Transparency and free access to source code provide very powerful tools for software development.

Commercial system level

However, building complex systems remains challenging. Developers who never worked in a large commercial project easily underestimate challenges outside the source code domain. Creating right user experience is hard. Collecting feedback from users during the development is not simple. Providing accurate project estimations for various stakeholders remains tough. Integrating complex systems from components that originate from different sources is much more difficult than writing the actual components. Testing and stabilizing large systems gets harder and harder as systems grow. Replanning after late and big changes in project conditions is laborious. And, running several software projects concurrently multiplies all the above challenges.


Open and Agile

Open source adds transparency to software development. The code, developers, and design decisions are all visible to everybody. I believe transparency can also be used in other areas of software projects. Agile methods, such as Scrum, can provide such transparency on the system project level.

Our context is challenging, though. Teams cannot be co-located. Non-agile hardware development happens simultaneously with software development. There are tens -- and even hundreads -- of Scrum teams working for a same project. Projects deal with issues ranging from hardware design, driver and OS base port, middleware and application adaptation -- all the way to end user experience and over 40 language variants ... and so forth. In these circumstances a basic idea of a a few agile software teams is hardly a complete solution.

I believe

It is a bit early for me to make any final conclusions of agile methods in practice. But I'm a believer, and we are using Scrum now more and more at Nokia. I believe that what open source has done for software development, agile methonds can do for commercial system and product development. Add visibility, access, and intellectual honesty. Transparency. You cannot hide shit no more.

Some time ago I asked you comments about openness. You sent me some interesting links. Thanks! I try to summarize your comments a bit.

Rights vs. executing the rights

Joel explained the idea of community openness by using three different characteristics:
1) the IP (right to use),
2) the development (right to influence the direction of the code) and
3) the governance (right to make decisions like who's in charge).

Then, Andreas talks about comparing and constracting community models by two axes:
- governance model
- license type used.

Both Andreas and Joel seem to have similar ideas, and I think they both have very good characterizations. But, in addition to these, I'd like to add an other dimension. The three elements above talk about the rights. In addition to the rights I'd like to think about the reality; i.e. is anybody really using these rights. And if not, why not.

Let me give you an example. Suppose I start on open source project and put my stuff into the sourceforge under GPL. I then invite others to discuss and influence the direction of the code I'm developing. And invite them to contribute. I also say that any time somebody suggest to change the leader, I'm ready to step down if somebody else gets a majority vote. So now, in Joel's three dimension model presented above, this would be very open, eh?

But what if nobody shows up? What if nobody is interested in my project and I'm left alone to develop it. Or if somebody just takes bits of my code and uses them elsewere inside another project. Is my project then open? I theory it is, but really? I'd claim that the project is open only if people use their rights, show up and contribute, and thus make it open. To me open source is more about "doing it" -- less about theory or human rights. So, to make the project open I also need to get others involved.

Another interesting aspect by Joel was his study on corporate sponsored open source projects. Check this one out!

Other comments

A good summary of different projects was provided by Smancke. He compares different projects in terms of their openness.

Jaffa gives us some ideas and opinions on how to continue with maemo. He talks about the community involvment, openness and control. He says "Nokia need to take action to really push community involvement. Nothing's got for free: if Nokia aren't seen to be committed to the community, why should the community be committed to Nokia?" Good points, Jaffa!

Usability

Then last but not least, David opened up a discussion on usability and open source. He refered at a good article by Matthew Paul Thomas. An interesting topic that needs attention. While talking to different people, I hear a lot of similar concerns and discussions.

Thanks!