A handful of people with ties to the maemo.org community have been kicking around the idea of a new podcast.  I’m not going to go too deeply into the proposed format at this time but rather will present the technical wishes discussed so far and solicit input from the readers on how to address them.

With few exceptions, the product talk around the upcoming MeeGo mobile operating system has highly-focused on netbooks and cell phones, and understandably so.  Intel’s legacy contribution to the joint effort, Moblin, was designed for the former while Nokia’s equivalent, Maemo, has been the foundation for the latter.

http://maps.ovi.com/

The shock of the Maemo + Moblin = MeeGo development has subsided and I think I’m now ready to offer some analysis as I see it.

This is still NOT good

Nokia’s launch last year of the N900 mobile computer introduced a bit of disruption to their normal business model.  The ripple effect naturally propagated down to the lowest levels and had a huge impact on the semi-independent community, maemo.org.

Thanks to Dave Neary I was reminded this morning of the upcoming FOSDEM 2010 conference in Brussels, Belgium, and brought up to date more-or-less on Maemo participation.

For those unfamiliar, FOSDEM stands for “Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting” and is an event held annually in Brussells.  The website description is:

FOSDEM is a free and non-commercial event organized by the community for the community. The goal is to provide Free Software and Open Source developers and communities a place to meet to:

• get in touch with other developers and projects;
• be informed about the latest developments in the Free Software and Open Source world;
• attend interesting talks and presentations held in large conference rooms by Free Software and Open Source project leaders and committers on various topics; and
• to promote the development and the benefits of Free Software and Open Source solutions.

Participation and attendance is totally free, though the organization gratefully accepts donationals and sponsorships.

Maemo had respectable representation in 2009 and hopefully this year is no different.  Note, however, that most of those listed on the current Maemo wiki are tentative for FOSDEM 2010– if you know for sure you’re going, now is the time to update your status!  I’m listed as volunteering but that was a shot in the dark; hopefully though we’ll have some sort of community council representation, possibly our chairman Valerio.

The event is scheduled for the 6th and 7th of February this year.  Details provided by Dave are:

Here’s the latest from FOSDEM co-ordination:

* Stand – unfortunately, we missed the November deadline for requesting a stand, so there will be no Maemo stand in FOSDEM this year. The list of stands is here: http://www.fosdem.org/2010/stands

* Presentations: There will be a Maemo presence in at least 3 different
devrooms this year:
* Mobile & Embedded
* GNOME
* Crossdistro

The final schedules have not yet been published.

Also of interest to Maemo participants, no doubt, will be Patrick Ohly’s presentation of SyncEvolution in the lightning talks at 18:00 on Saturday.

As more Maemo related content gets schedules I’ll keep you posted.

I would also like to propose that we have a Maemo get-together on Saturday night in Brussels. Anyone interested?

Hopefully we get enough of the right people going, and this turns out to be a successful engagement for Maemo and FOSDEM alike.  I’ll post again when I have more details.

Enjoy the event guys!  Keep us updated.