The book was edited by Lydia Pintscher and includes essays from 42 authors, many of whom you'll recognize if you tend to go to FOSS conferences. The LWN book review concludes:

Open Advice is a book that will be helpful to those who are new to FOSS, but, because of the individual voices, styles, and tones, it doesn't read like a "how to". It could even be recommended to those who aren't necessarily interested in contributing, but are curious about what this "free software thing" is all about. It is, in short, a great book for a variety of audiences and the (mostly) two or three page essays make it easy to read, while the anecdotes and recollections personalize it. The authors, editor, and everyone else who helped should be very pleased with the result. Readers will be too.

I probably shouldn't give the ending away, but my essay on cross-project collaboration, a subject I've also blogged about, ends with:

Good luck with breaking down the project boundaries! In most cases it works if your ideas are good and presented with an open mind. But even if you do not find a common ground, as long as your implementation solves the use case for you it has not been in vain. After all, delivering software, and delivering great user experience is what counts.

The book is licensed under CC-BY-SA, and is available as free download in ePub, mobi and PDF formats, and as paperback from Lulu. The book sources are available on GitHub, patches welcome!

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Our primary goal is to facilitate meetups, collaboration and awareness between different projects and communities within Open Mobile Linux and provide a place to present directions, ideas and your projects themselves.

By Open Mobile Linux we mean any open source projects revolving around typical non-desktop/server Linux, such as handsets, tablets, netbooks or other creative uses. Examples of such projects could be Qt5, Mer, MeeGo, Android, webOS, Plasma Active, Tizen, Boot to Gecko, SHR and other related efforts.

There are several exciting things happening in this space, including the recently announced Spark tablet, open sourcing of webOS's Enyo framework and continuing interest in the Maemo platform. Saturday's program includes:

• Mer ... and what you can do with it (David Greaves, 11:30-12:00)
• Openmoko Freerunner - Present and Future (Niels Heyvaert, 12:00-12:30)
• Towards Accelerated UI's on Mobile Linux With Power of Qt5 (Saija Eteläniemi, 12:30-13:00)
• Intro to Tizen and the Future of the Community (Dawn Foster, 13:00-13:30)
• buildroot: flexible building of a custom embedded system (Arnout Vandecappelle, 13:30-14:00)
• Deep Dive into KDE Mobile development on N9/N950 (Laszlo Papp, 14:00-14:30)
• Community Qt apps repository - way forward (Jukka Eklund, 14:30-15:00)
• Maliit - the open mobile text input project (Jon Nordby, 15:00-15:30)
• Nemo Mobile - How to contribute to the project (Marko Saukko, 15:30-16:00)
• Introduction to the QtOnPi project (Rajiv Ranganath, 16:00-16:30)
• An update on PIM storage and sync: SyncEvolution (Patrick Ohly, 16:30-17:00)
• OS in the Mobile App Stores (Thomas Bonte, 17:00-17:30)
• Rygel: Free and Open Mobile DLNA (Jens Georg, 17:30-18:00)

If there are any last-minute announcements or happenings that people want to discuss, we may be a ble to squeeze in a talk or two. Contact Carsten about this.

Also, if you want to chat other things (like PHPCR or CreateJS), I'll be around the whole weekend including the beer event. Drop me an SMS.

Looking forward to seeing as many of you there as possible!

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Please send a short biography and an abstract for your talk to carsten.munk@gmail.com by Dec 31st 2011, and we'll get back to you at latest January 7th.

We're also grateful for volunteers helping to run the devroom. Contact Carsten if you're interested.

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One option is to follow the lead of the big companies, hoping that Tizen works, or that Google again sees the benefit of working with others in the open.

The other is to take the matters in our own hands. There is precedent for this. Much of early Linux activity came from the efforts of the community, not on the initiative of corporate interests. And there have been OpenMoko and Mer, the latter an attempt to make a fully open version of Nokia's Maemo environment, suspended when MeeGo promised to bring the same benefits.

Well, now Mer is back.

The goals for Mer align pretty well with what the community would need:

• To be openly developed and openly governed as a meritocracy
• That primary customers of the platform are device vendors - not end-users.
• To provide a device manufacturer oriented structure, processes and tools: make life easy for them
• To have a device oriented architecture
• To be inclusive of technologies (such as MeeGo/Tizen/Qt/EFL/HTML5)
• To innovate in the mobile OS space

There have also been some other invitations to new potential homes for the community, ranging from openSUSE to Debian.

It will be interesting to see how this works out. But whatever we as a community do, we should ensure we look at more than just licensing.

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MG Siegler from TechCrunch has a great post on the subject:

...I’ve been trained over time to think that the traditional PC is the way to do these things whether it’s for work or play. That’s simply not true. The tablet form factor is so. much. better. when you don’t have to do an excessive amount of typing. And during downtime, when I use a computer like a more regular human being, I’ve found that’s often...

Computing is changing. That’s just about the most obvious statement ever. We’ve been seeing this for years with the rise of the smartphones. But traditional computing is changing as well. As in, people are abandoning PCs for these newer devices. And this will keep happening.

My experience conforms with this. I rarely use my laptop outside of the work context of writing code, instead preferring to use the tablet with its great ergonomics, portability and long battery life. On some of my previous trips I noticed that already more than half of people sitting in airport lounges use a tablet instead of a laptop. Not bad for a product category that has existed in a mainstream manner for less than two years. Nokia's internet tablets blazed the trail years earlier, but were never marketed outside the geekdom.

Now, much of the attention in the tablet world has been focused on the couple of platforms that are winning in popularity, and therefore have most of the apps. But regardless of how well Apple and Google play their cards, the post-PC world will be a multiplatform one.

About a week after I got my webOS-powered TouchPad, HP went and killed the product. Yet this hasn't made the device useless. As Paul Rouget recently found out, as long as you have a good browser, your device will be relevant.

Some people can't or don't want to use Native Apps. Because their phones don't have Apps, or because there is just no good Apps for what they want to do, or because, well, because they don't need to...

While in the Western world we were looking at Apple bringing pretty Apps in an expensive device, in the Eastern world, Opera was bringing a working web browser to all the existing devices.

This is the big opportunity for free software to remain relevant in an environment of highly-locked devices. Much of the web already runs on free components, and by using the web as a universal runtime we can bypass almost any platform restrictions. As Paul Graham wrote back in 2001, no one can break web applications without breaking browsing.

The world of publishing is starting to understand this. Their revenue models can't take the heavy control that vendors like Apple imposes, and so Amazon's Kindle is a web app, and so is Financial Times. That "Next year HTML5 will replace native apps" is the new "Next year will be the year of Linux on the desktop" is already a Twitter joke, but there is certainly some movement in this direction. And interestingly, the Linux desktop is actually becoming more web-savvy and touch-friendly.

There are clearly sweet spots for something to be a web app, or for it to be a native application. Similarly, there are different situations where tablets will be the appropriate tool, and where PCs are. The tablet context will be more like this:

Than this:

The heavy lifting is a better fit for a system designed for that. As Steve Jobs said, the PC will be the truck.

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Even in the ten years of history of our company this is quite a significant move - it allows us to combine Nemein's traditional expertise on content management with Infigo's mobile offerings. As smartphones and tablets are becoming popular, more and more services we build will have a mobile element, which is now easier with lots of in-house expertise.

This also means more focus on the interplay between the Midgard content repository, NoFlo workflows, Node.js and Symfony web services, and mobile applications built in Qt.

Petri Rajahalme (with me in the photo) will be the CEO of the merged company, and I will focus on leading the R&D efforts.

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Now, one of the things I've talked about with people is NoFlo, my new tool that brings Flow-Based Programming to Node.js. What is that? Wikipedia explains:

Flow-based programming (FBP) is a programming paradigm that defines applications as networks of "black box" processes, which exchange data across predefined connections by message passing, where the connections are specified externally to the processes. These black box processes can be reconnected endlessly to form different applications without having to be changed internally. FBP is thus naturally component-oriented.

Basically the idea here is to simplify managing the control flow of software: what data goes where, what happens then, etc. with the goal of making software more understandable. With NoFlo you can go and peek under the hood of a running piece of software, see where data is going to, and even rewire some connections if you want to.

The project is still in reasonably early stages, but it is already used in at least one real-life deployment. Here are some sneak peeks:

:

If you're interested, follow the progress on my GitHub repo, or subscribe to the Flow-Based Programming mailing list.

In the spirit of Desktop Summit, it would be interesting to talk how these workflows would fit into the concept of a free software desktop.

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Now I would like to bring GObject Introspection to PHP. Why?

For many years we in the Midgard community have been using GNOME infrastructure on the web server side, by building our persistence layer on top of GObjects, and providing D-Bus notifications when content changes. So far this has been done with our own custom PHP extension.

I believe a common PHP extension providing GObject Introspection support would make more sense, as it wouldn't just benefit our own community, but also support efforts like php-gtk.

Alexey Zakhlestin already started a project for this a while back, but unfortunately has been unable to finish it. Because of this, we would be willing to sponsor anybody interested in making the gobject-for-php extension work.

Benefits for the GNOME community:

• New supported development language and a large community of potential contributors
• The possibility of making the GNOME stack relevant in web space. Just think of Telepathy or GStreamer in a web app

Benefits for the PHP community:

• Access to the rich collection of GNOME libraries, many which may be useful when building web applications
• Being able to use your PHP skills to build GNOME applications and bring them to interesting environments like Ubuntu and Cordia

Benefits for the Midgard community:

• No need to maintain our own custom PHP extension
• A more generic GObject Introspection extension has better chances of being included into Linux distributions and being available on hosting providers

Let me know if you are interested. We're coming to the Desktop Summit with Piotras, so for example that is a great opportunity to talk more about this.

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After the recent San Francisco MeeGo Conference there has been surprisingly much negative reporting about MeeGo, mostly centered at Nokia's MeeGo story. While Nokia's strategy changes are unfortunate, much of the reporting around it appears to come from misunderstanding what MeeGo is about.

Many see MeeGo just as Android without Java, but it is much more, as I'll explain here.

Industrial Linux

MeeGo is much more than just handsets or tablets. It is an attempt at creating a standardized industrial Linux distribution that can be used anywhere from in-vehicle infotainment devices to TVs to, indeed, handsets.

It is a true open and collaborative environment, managed by Linux Foundation. The governance model is there to ensure that MeeGo stays a vendor-neutral platform that anybody can build their products on top.

Many device segments have very long development, and especially usage times. For this MeeGo has a predictable release schedule of a major release every six months, and a roadmap kept by the Technical Steering Group.

If MeeGo succeeds in this, you will be using it in your TV, in your car stereo, and at the back of an airline seat. But in most of these situations you won't be able to know that it is MeeGo. It is simply there to make building products faster and cheaper for the manufacturer.

Openness

As I argued in my earlier piece Open Source? Free Software? What we need is Open Projects, being an open platform is much more than just the licensing terms of the code. There needs to be transparency into the development process, a clear procedure on how to participate and much more. And of course licensing has to be such that the participants can actually use the results in whatever they're doing.

For this, most of MeeGo is licensed under permissive terms, like the GNU LGPL and BSD-style licenses.

But indeed, the other aspects of openness are more important. With MeeGo you can see every commit happening on Gitorious, and you can see the bugs and features being worked out in a public Bugzilla.

MeeGo as a project is still quite young, and many participants are still learning how to work in the open. This has lead to some issues in project transparency. But hopefully those are now getting resolved.

User Experience

MeeGo allows anyone to build their own user experience on top of the platform. Actually, this is expected of any serious manufacturer. Sure, there are some reference UXs available, including Tablet, Handset and Netbook, but none of these are quite product-ready, and are not necessarily even intended to be.

Because of this it is quite funny to see reviews of the reference UXs. They're not the ones most devices will run, though obviously some manufacturers or community members are going to use them anyway. A full MeeGo product will look and feel like something completely different.

This is not like Android manufacturers adding their own skins. With MeeGo anybody has the full freedom to build a complete user experience that suits their device, branding and other goals. The whole platform has been built to allow this sort of differentiation, without a risk of fragmenting the ecosystem. I'll explain the fragmentation question soon.

Actually, the freedom of defining your own user interface is big enough that both Android and WebOS could theoretically be rebased on top of MeeGo to be just different MeeGo UXs. Obviously they would need to allow running MeeGo-compliant Qt applications in addition to ones written for them directly, but that is minor detail. WebOS already ships Qt, so it isn't even that far from this. Similarly, KDE or GNOME could run as MeeGo UXs.

Compliance

At the core of MeeGo there is a set of compliance rules. Being Open Source, anybody can take MeeGo, modify it, and run it on their devices. But only if their implementation passes MeeGo compliance it can be called MeeGo.

Device Compliance is a set of rules that ensures any MeeGo-compliant software can run on a particular device. Application Compliance similarly ensures an app can be installed and run on any MeeGo-compliant device.

Both of these sets of compliance rules have automated tests that anybody can run. So, between non-compliant MeeGo-related software there may be fragmentation, but anything branded MeeGo (and therefore compliant) must be fully compatible.

App Stores and business models

MeeGo is an open source project, not a company. This means it comes without strings attached, compliance rules aside. There are no limitations on the business model of a MeeGo device manufacturer, no mandatory online services or app stores to enable, and no royalty payments.

With this, each vendor can decide what they want to enable their users to do with the device. An embedded device might have no concept of installable applications, a tablet might come with the vendor's own app store.

For those who do not want to go through trouble of building their own developer ecosystems and app stores, there are some generic solutions available in the MeeGo sphere:

Intel's AppUp is a "white label" app store. This means that a device manufacturer, or even retailer or operator can get an instance of AppUp with their own branding and a revenue sharing deal with Intel. Developers submit software only once and it will be available on all the different branded AppUps.

On the more open side, there is also the upcoming MeeGo Community Apps, a fully community driven "store" of free software written for MeeGo. It comes with its own, OCS-compatible client application, a web frontend, and clear set of crowdsourced app quality assurance processes. The similarly handled Maemo Downloads has served over 80 million downloads for the Nokia N900, so the user and developer interest is clearly there.

The future of MeeGo

At this early stage of the project it is hard to make predictions, but there are many things MeeGo gets right. I think it has a bright future ahead of it, especially in more specialized devices. There the shared infrastructure and clear development schedule give manufacturers substantial advantages in both development time and cost.

Product development times in the embedded sector are quite long, and it may well take years before we'll see MeeGo in a airline multimedia system. But if the project shows the necessary durability and longevity, this will eventually happen. Now many of those systems run on customized Linux distributions that their manufacturers have to spend quite a bit of money to maintain. MeeGo removes that problem, and allows easier collaboration through the compliance rules.

As for consumer devices like tablets and handsets, that area mostly requires there to be a vendor that wants to properly differentiate itself from the grey masses of the Android ecosystem. MeeGo provides all the necessary tools on both systems side and user interface development to make that happen.

Currently there are many different ideas floating around on how to build user experiences on connected devices. There is the "wall of apps" approach of iPhone, there are the fully cloud-connected WebOS and Android approaches, and now Microsoft is also starting to enter the game with their own ideas.

I don't think the "post-PC" world is yet complete. What MeeGo gives is a fast way to build products differentiating from that crowd. It just needs companies who are willing to go for it.

The next couple of years will be quite interesting.

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• MeeGo Conference, May 23-25
• Aloha Editor dev con, June 6-8

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I'll give two talks:

• Location awareness in MeeGo, Hacks & Tricks track Friday 15:30
• Midgard Create - Content Management System without forms, Finhack Saturday 12:00

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Cross-project collaboration is hard. I know. For many years I've been pushing for location-awareness across desktops, for using shared content repositories instead of application-specific file formats or databases, and most recently for having a common client-side data representation and manipulation layer on content management systems. Some of these ideas have moved forward. Some others, less so.

What is important to remember is that each project has their own use cases, user experience goals and set of selected technologies to build on. If a collaborative approach you propose doesn't fit those, it is highly unlikely that the project will adopt it. And there is nothing wrong with that.

Instead of looking at the failures, we should think of the ways cross-desktop collaboration has moved forward. Here are some examples:

• D-Bus is pretty much everywhere now. A common way to handle signalling and API calls between processes is a big step
• Telepathy provides a great real-time communications system on all desktops
• All projects seem a lot more UX-focused nowadays. Great examples are window management in GNOME Shell, web integration in KDE, and better handling of quitting applications and scrolling in them in Unity. These ideas are easy to transfer between projects
• There is work ongoing on unifying application installers between distributions. Open Collaboration Services is also useful here
• Wayland shows great promise for simplifying the graphics layer on Linux desktops

So, if you want to get a specification accepted between projects, how to go about it?

First of all, you should communicate early and clearly the use cases your specification aims for. And then there should be a reference implementation available, not only as a library, but also as something already integrated in your UX.

If you want projects to actually use your reference implementation instead of building their own, then it is important to remove as many obstacles from adopting it as possible:

• Use permissive licensing and try to avoid copyright assignments or other requirements potential users would find onerous
• Host the project on neutral ground. For web projects, Apache is quite a good home. For desktop projects, Freedesktop is probably the best option
• Use technologies that don't impose too many constraints. Libraries should be quite low-level, or provide D-Bus APIs that can be used with any system
• Avoid technology-specific dependencies. For example, KDE has found GeoClue hard to adopt because it uses GNOME-specific settings interfaces
• Talk with the other guys. If you're from the GNOME project, go to aKademy and give a talk, and if you're a KDE developer, go and talk in GUADEC. IRC isn't bad here either
• Finally, accept that not everybody will use your implementation. But if they at least implement the same ideas, then collaboration is still possible.

And even if your ideas haven't been adopted by other projects, as long as your implementation solves the use case for you it hasn't been in vain. After all, delivering software, and delivering great user experience is what counts.

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JavaScript is already fairly prominent in free software development. The GNOME Shell has been largely written in it, Qt Quick builds on it, and most of the common JavaScript libraries are free software. There are even ways to run JS as a server or build your own desktop applications with it.

For those looking to get started with JavaScript, here are some useful resources:

• Eloquent JavaScript is a free e-book that provides an introduction to the language. Read especially the chapter on functional programming
• CommonJS is a specification for writing interoperable JS modules. There is a tutorial on writing modules that work both on the browser and the server
• Backbone.js is a useful Model-View-Controller system for JavaScript. We use it with Midgard Create
• For those who dislike the JS syntax, there is CoffeeScript that provides a cleaner way to write your code. It compiles to JavaScript much like Vala compiles to GObject-oriented C
• Cloud9IDE provides a web-based IDE for JavaScript development. It integrates with Git repositories, and you can either run your own instance or use the hosted version
• JSLint is a good way to check your code for hidden problems
• The JavaScript Garden is also a good source of documentation

While there will never be a "one true language" to program in, JavaScript has the potential to be a big thing. And for writing and sharing software across platform boundaries, it may be the only way. It runs even on the most walled of gardens.

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• We held three Midgard Gatherings: one in Lodz, Poland in April, one in Tampere, Finland in July and one in Gothenburg, Sweden in November. In April we announced the new directions of the project.
• The project completed a migration to Git (and GitHub) for Midgard2 and Midgard MVC, together with a change in the development process to facilitate a more decentralized way of working
• The Long-Term Supported Midgard1 series 8.09 Ragnaroek had two releases: .8 and .9. After .9 there have been substantial performance improvements that still wait for release
• Midgard2 had its first Long-Term Supported version 10.05 Ratatoskr, with three releases: .0, .1 and .2
• Midgard2 started providing language bindings via GObject Introspection
• Midgard2 landed into Debian unstable, Maemo Extras and MeeGo Community OBS
• Third generation of Midgard Content Repository had its first release showcasing more flexible model definition and built-in RDF storage. The new MidgardCR is written in Vala
• First version of the Midgard Create content management interface was shown
• Midgard MVC gained a new application installer tool and the ability to be run on the PHP Application Server
• The OpenPSA management suite was forked out from Ragnaroek tree, ported to Midgard2 and packaged for Ubuntu
• On Maemo, Midgard-powered applications like The Tablet of Adventure and MaeCalories provided tens of thousands of Midgard installations on mobile phones

Unfortunately at the same time the Midgard developer community has stayed quite small and insular. This will hopefully improve through easier installation, availability of Midgard libraries in Linux distributions and closer collaboration with the rest of the PHP world as a participant of the Zeta Components ecosystem.

We still also need to solve the project governance question of either running our own association or joining a major organization like ASF. The relation between Midgard and the GNOME project on which we heavily rely on should also be clarified.

See also the Midgard in 2009 post.

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Tablets and handsets can displace computers as play and reading devices, but they really can't become dominant as work tools until we have a better solution for high-speed low-friction text input. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised to see dramatic progress in this area; it’s so obviously the number-one usability barrier for everything that isn’t badged as a "computer".

I've seen some interesting approaches at solving the text input problem. But the other option is of course that other means of communicating become more prominent: videos, audio messages, etc. A flickr is worth 50 tweets, after all. But how do you program then?

Updated: Alex Payne thinks video will replace textual communication:

My generation will be at something of a loss when this new world comes about. In my life, I’ve been rewarded for communicating effectively online via text. I’m a reasonably effective verbal communicator, but not nearly as good as I’ll need to be to compete with the telepresence-native adults that the children of today will grow up to be.

Today’s digital natives will be tomorrow’s telegraph operators. The only way to survive will be to understand the impact of pervasive video communication before it sweeps us under our keyboards.

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The event will be keynoted by Nokia's MeeGo Developer Advocate Ronan Mac Laverty. Register now!

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Some guidelines:

• Separate your core distribution and application packages
• Approval process should have three layers: development, testing and stable, individually for each application targeting a particular distribution version
• Anybody can upload packages to development status, and then promote them to testing
• On their way from development to testing packages should pass automated tests
• Anybody can install and test packages that are in testing, and vote for them
• Testing guidelines should be clear and easily available to anybody interested in testing
• Quarantine period for applications being tested (ten days in case of Maemo)
• When quarantine has passed and application has enough positive votes, developer can promote the package to stable

Hopefully these ideas will prove helpful for other distributions like MeeGo, Ubuntu or Debian. See also my slides from an earlier talk on the same subject.

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Updated 2010-09-28: Buscatcher now has a stable release that is available from Maemo Downloads with already more than 10,000 installations.

For other platforms, you can grab and run the application from the GitHub repo. It should run on regular Linux desktops, and there have been reports of working on also platforms like the OpenMoko Freerunner.

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At maemo.org we have an appstore for FOSS applications on the Maemo platform. This appstore is enabled by default on all Nokia N900s so we wanted to have some quality control. We had to create our own appstore approval process, compatible with the FOSS philosophy. Now any developer can submit an app, and anyone can test and vote. The whole process is completely transparent, auditable and visible. And it also provides a feedback channel from testers and users to the developers!

...

Midgard is a data storage service. Whether you write desktop or web applications, instead of coming up with your own file format, you just use Midgard. You can work more easily and object-based. Users have many different devices these days, so Midgard has strong replication features to synchronize between different systems. Midgard is built on top of GObject; we provide bindings to a bunch of different languages so developers can choose the tools they like - PHP, Python, Javascript. Currently (as in now, while we're talking) Qt bindings are being developed here at Akademy.

Read the whole interview.

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Computational photography refers to the ways computers can extend the capabilities of digital imaging by combining multiple photographs taken with different camera settings to create an image that could not be taken in a single shot, or with an ordinary camera.

Some of these new ways of combining images can be done in Photoshop or another such program, but until now they could not be done inside the camera, Levoy said. That's because commercial cameras are closed to development by all but their manufacturers. Frankencamera, on the other hand, brings computational photography directly to the camera, by making the camera a programmable platform.

I installed fCamera and the HDR photo assistant from Maemo extras-devel yesterday, and the results (taking .DNG RAW images, automatically generating HDR pictures) seem quite impressive. Here is a quick example from our office. Sun is shining outside and the office is not lit:

For comparison, here is the same setting with the regular N900 camera application:

It will be interesting to see what developers will come up with, now that all these camera capabilities are available through an open API!

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