Intel Drops MeeGo 121
PolygamousRanchKid writes with an article in CNet about yet more dismal news for MeeGo. Quoting the article: "Like the Moblin operating system before it, Linux-based MeeGo will will be merged out of existence. MeeGo will become Tizen, Intel said today. 'Intel joined Linux Foundation and LiMo Foundation in support of Tizen, a new Linux-based open source software platform for multiple device categories,' the company said in a statement. 'Tizen builds upon the strengths of both LiMo and MeeGo and Intel will be working with our MeeGo partners to help them transition to Tizen,' Intel said. The initial release of Tizen is expected in Q1 2012, enabling the first devices in the market mid-2012..."
PolygamousRanchKid adds "It seems one of those strengths is not actually making it into a product on the market yet." This on the heels of Nokia shipping the N9 (which is actually running a weird Maemo/Meego hybrid).
Misleading title (Score:2)
This sounds like a great thing, not at all like the title implies. Pooling the rescources into a project that has a greater chance of success, should prove a good thing for everyone who cares about MeeGo. There's enough of a lead for the competetion as it is, even without dividing the OS community into different factions.
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Re:Misleading title (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out, but maybe all these projects are dying because they are pointless? Apple rules the tablet, MSFT the desktop, and the phone is split between Apple and Google. So where is the market they were going to capture?
Of course, if everybody thought like that, Apple would never have gone on to rule the tablet, nor MSFT the desktop, and neither Apple nor Google would be in the phone market. All of these segments were dominated by other vendors before.
So, far from being pointless, projects like Maemo are very interesting, because they have the potential to bring something new (and, in this case, more standard and open) to the scene. That's why it is so sad they have been going nowhere, and that is why we have this story on Slashdot. If it wasn't for that, Meego would just be another unpopular project that nobody cared about. It is interesting because, at least in theory, it could break the grasp of the major vendors.
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Sadly, I agree with you to some extent. Maemo, I like. It brought major power to a hand-held device, had a full Linux stack, could run chroots of other OS's, and allowed custom kernels etc.
It also has a *great* multitasking ability, though, obviously, leaving things running eats battery life.
MeeGo... As far as I can tell, it has none of the benefits of Maemo, and with a lot of drawbacks including being locked down with digital signatures.
Also, as far as a rollback button? Two points:
1, I did something simil
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So in an already overcrowded arena Intel looked at the writing on the wall and saw they were just wasting good money on a dead end.
But that's the thing, they haven't seen the writing on the wall and are persisting to try it. The people they partnered with saw it and fleed but Intel continue to flog the dead horse, hence this new-but-old project now
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Well, and the difference is that producing hardware is not exactly cheap. So we've got the N900 running Maemo5 which is rather strongly different from earlier releases on the N8xx devices. Then we were told, after the N900 was received nicely (as a mobile, not a tablet), from Nokia that they'll merge Maemo into Meego.
At the same time, the whole distribution was changing over from Gtk to Qt, because Nokia wanted one toolkit that works on all it's platforms. Than Nokia decided to get paid for committing suici
Re:Misleading title (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't a good thing. I don't know what moblin was like, but Mameo was pretty much a fully complete, working operating system that shipped on actual devices the merger with Moblin set them back a couple years. Nokia would have been better off to decline the invitation to merge with Moblin.
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Moblin was a sad joke that never worked well in ANY incarnation, and it was no loss to see it go. I played with several versions and all gave me free reboots and lots of explosions in the UI. When you add to that the fact that most of what Intel did was rip out support for competing processors, it's hard to see why anyone ever got excited about Moblin.
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Meego was a Qt-based Linux distribution. The main point was running native apps on it, taking advantage of the fact that Meego, Symbian and S40 all run Qt (you can target Meego just by recompiling the software you wrote for the millions of Symbian^3 and S40 devices out there. It would have a gigantic number of apps right from the start, and very clear Linux roots.
This Tizen thing is a browser. Just HTML5 apps. In other words, apps that every other platform can run; no exclusive apps. No incentive to develop
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What exactly is your definition of "proprietary"? Android is free software as far as I can tell.
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Yep. On the other hand, the LiMo Foundation's entire purpose was to develop a closed source platform for mobile phones based on top of Linux. They tried to obtain the cost savings associated with open source by adopting open source-style development practices and using a license that granted access to the source code to members of the group, but with a restriction preventing their members from sharing the LiMo source code with anyone outside of the foundation. (IIRC members weren't even allowed to share sou
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Not really, my N900 is almost as much in Nokia service than with me.
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My prediction - in early 2014, Samsung will announce that they are stopping their Tizen efforts to concentrate on Android. Later in 2014, they will finally release their one and only (ARM based) Tizen device, and Intel will announce a new partnership with HTC to develop a new Linux based phone OS so that Intel CPUs can take over the smartphone market (having lost most of the desktop market to ARM by this point), with first release in early 20
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this reminds me of the standards [xkcd.com]
Only that instead of standards it's linux type OSs comunities that get populated and perpetuated.
<drivel><halfbaked>
This is sad, very very sad...
Can we at least now acknowledge that the FOSS community has to build the OS top down on their own so that we actually get a product? I mean there is Actually arch for arm devices [archlinuxarm.org].
Just convince some desktop devs to throw together a basic tablet/touch UI from spare code left and right (lets call it gnome 3.3)
And then just
Imaginary scenario (Score:5, Funny)
Board members: MeeGo, we need to talk
MeeGo: MeeGo is listening?
Board members: It's not working out, we're going to have to let you go
MeeGo: We go?
Board members: No, just you
MeeGo: Me go?
Board members: Yes, MeeGo, you go
MeeGo: MeeGo go?
Board members: (sigh) Just get out
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I like it!!! Meego... May be if they had named it iStay?? then it would have been here forever?
Mego is dead, Webos is dead ... (Score:4, Funny)
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It would look as it a mobile OS is only reachable by big megacorps (iOS, Android, Windows). Community based devlopment will never work here as every company has their own agenda to push and want it now. This is a recipe for disaster.
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Yea, there's just no room in this world for a small, scrappy underdog like Intel.....
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haha, windows?
Windows Phone has the same level of success as Meego, except they've spent billions pushing it.
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No, you can actually buy a Windows Phone. And they work pretty well.
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Meanwhile the rest of the world uses something else on actual, shipped devices.
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Like the awesome Maemo I have on my n900?
Re:Mego is dead, Webos is dead ... (Score:5, Funny)
Like the awesome Maemo I have on my n900?
That was abandoned for a new platform, which has just been abandoned for a new platform.
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N900 is a great device but it has no AT&T 3G frequencies and no proper Exchange support (provisioning, certificate authentication) and the arrogant attitude of the Nokia devs that worked on Exchange support.
The othe problem it has is the fact that Nokia usually puts about half of the memory the system needs on all N devices.
64MB on N770 was a joke, then 128MB on N800/810 was barely to keep the OS so the browser blows up on any bigger web page. Then they put 256MB in N900 which is still way too little. T
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I'll admit the N900's hardware is woefully underpowered, and that's actually why I was hoping so very much for *some* sort of update; even the minor one of the n9/n950 would be appreciated.
In spite of that, I *vastly* prefer it over the Epic 4G that I currently use as my main phone, mainly because it's real Linux (and all the usual, wonderful tools that includes) instead of java-ish half-breed that barely counts as linux.
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I've been seriously thinking about getting a N900 2nd hand as it's easily the best thing out there with a keyboard.
Intel dropping support makes me worry about its longevity but I guess the N900 wouldn't last > 2 years anyway. Maybe the prices will fall to the point where it's worthwhile either way.
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good and bad (Score:3, Insightful)
Bad news, intel drops it.
Good news, Linux Foundation is in charge. Some of you may not have followed along since the beginning, but Moblin begat Meego, and what was Moblin? Intel put a Clutter-based UI on Linux after stripping its ability to run on anything not based on a recent Intel CPU. Whoop. De. Doo. None of what Intel did to Linux with Moblin has any repercussions for anyone not using an x86-compatible Intel processor. While that does still seem to cover the majority of the market, it's still not an interesting basis for a Linux distribution; rather, it is a collection of features which by now have made it into the mainline.
So the bad news is that Intel has given up on the notion that x86 is ready for phones, but that's good news too. And meanwhile, Intel can go back to doing what they do best, trying to trip AMD up so that they don't have to compete on a level playing field. Since anyone can contribute to Linux, they were never going to differentiate themselves from AMD there.
No repercussions? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not quite sure what you mean when you say "None of what Intel did to Linux with Moblin has any repercussions for anyone not using an x86-compatible Intel processor." For now I will interpret that as "they did nothing of interest for machines with CPUs from AMD/ARM etc.
Arjan van de van's work on asynchronous initialization of kernel subsystems [lwn.net] means you will spend less time waiting for the kernel to finishon all sorts of CPUs - not just x86s. Powertop [lesswatts.org] works on CPUs other than Intel's [linaro.org] and has been used to
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None of that was related to moblin except retroactively. The improved boot time was demonstrated with both moblin and fedora and powertop was its own thing.
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I'm not sure I buy that "Intel has given up on the notion that x86 is ready for phones", given that they recently showcased an x86-Android tablet. It's just a different strategy. In my opinion, they should have done this in February, when Nokia stabbed them in the back.
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But the Nokia/Intel thing was never going to last anyway. That was Nokia giving their new boyfriend, Intel, a blowjob, and sending the camphone photos to their ex, TI.
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I like your analogies. But I honestly think MS have the best intentions (of profiting) with the deal. It's just that Nokia should have played their cards better.
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Tablets next to phones, or which contain a phone radio yet do not function as phones, are still viable contexts for x86. However, Intel still has yet to show a CPU+Chipset with a viable TDP for anything that fits in your pocket and lasts all day.
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How the hell have the relevant companies managed to screw up producing a Linux-based mobile phone OS/interface so badly?
Smartphones these days are close to general-purpose computers (albeit with mobile telephony hardware), but these companies have spent tens if not hundreds of man-years trying and failing to do little more than port an already-written OS to a new hardware platform and add a few simple apps (phone dialer/receiver, contact database, appointments/reminder app, and port a browser and media play
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How the hell have the relevant companies managed to screw up producing a Linux-based mobile phone OS/interface so badly?
Easy. Every time they got it working, they started again from scratch.
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why don't they use http://www.emdebian.org/ [emdebian.org] instead of reinventing again and again yet another distro
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How the hell have the relevant companies managed to screw up producing a Linux-based mobile phone OS/interface so badly?
I've highlighted the relevant word for you. It's because these are companies with bureaucratic processes and hidden agendas. In these alliances, they cooperate on low-level stuff but try to preserve some sort of "secret sauce," to the detriment of the whole, and that's when they're working properly. Very few companies have the successful dictator like Steve Jobs of Apple.
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The Linux Foundation is a puppet for the companies that fund them.
Yeah, that's how it works. But it has done a decent thing or two.
Android-alike (Score:2)
Reading the announcement of Tizen, it looks like another Android, a linux backend with an interpreted front-end. It mentions HTML5 as the primary API, how well that will work remains to be seen. It mentions an NDK, but frankly, I was hoping for a replacement for the N900 OS, i.e. something that would run unmodified Linux applications - and this doesn't look like it.
That and the idea of developers having to target yet another incompatible platform alongside IOS, Android, RIM and that other one doesn't exac
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The only chance to succeed is to offer the same front-end APIs/runtime/libs to work (adapted) on true Linux OS. You probably won't have full acceess to Posix, neither a hi-res screen in Tizen, but its native apps should run bigger and faster in a desktop just recompiling (or even better without recompiling).
Worst case, the NDK is probably "The Best Of POSIX", like the Android one. That alone would be useful, since you could reuse any Android NDK stuff, but what I really wanted out of Meego was something that can run SSH, Gimp and Pidgin on a tablet or ARM laptop.
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I really wanted the n900, and would have bought one except that I had purchased the n770 several years earlier. The n770 was a great little tablet, very cool, out to market way ahead of the iPhone with all of the features except the phone. When Nokia upgraded to the n800, the n770 lost all support from maemo. The new OS couldnt back port, all apps were being supported on the new OS, so my cool little device just sat there with no community and no support. I was very wary of the n900 for this, and waited to
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That was less due to the OS and more due to the device itself. It couldn't hold the OS that they arrived at with the version for the N8x0 series. Blame Nokia for cheapening the N770 too much (there were design "oopses" within the N770 that led me to wait until the N800 came out...) there.
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that doesnt mean that they should have just removed all support, effort and updates immediately. They basically forced all customers to upgrade hardware to continue to have application support. This was a consistent behavior from Nokia. I wont believe that anything with roots in these projects will ever stop the cycle until I actually see it happen.
I think this is close to accurate... all coming from memory.
The 800 replaced the 770. The 880 was a minor upgrade that I dont think required full hardware upgrad
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Au contraire - everything I witnessed pointed to people buying every n900 they could get their hands on. The hobbyists were clearly interested.
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I bought an N900 precisely because it was OPEN and didnt try to
stop me from running what I want to.
My N900 does not support Cell Broadcast SMS. However, the support is there in the cellular modem and telephony stack.
Thanks to a small binary patch to the SMS library and a (yet to be written) GUI app its possible to add Cell Broadcast SMS to this phone. Try doing that on an iPhone without months of reverse engineering of every piece of the telephony stack. And then find a way to release it without being sued
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I haven't looked at the announcement itself yet, but that right there makes it sound like WebOS, or "PhoneGap, The Operating System"...and I'm okay with that.
If they can manage to get devices out and price them substantially lower than the premium iPod Mega (or 'iPad' if you prefer) or Xoom sorts of gadgets I'd love to have something like that.
Interesting move. (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't help but notice that Samsung is a partner. Could this be the OS we kept hearing rumors about? You know the one where Samsung is nervous about Google's purchase of Motorola and needs to hedge its bets by having their own OS.
I would love to see Meego/Tizen continue to exist. I'm glad Samsung is stepping up to replace Nokia that went to Microsoft.
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Samsung already has their own OS Bada. It is deployed on actual devices in Europe. Samsung says they will keep it for the lower end phones, but there is nothing stopping them from evolving it further. I don't really understand their interest in Tizen?
Intel renames AppUp Store! (Score:5, Funny)
New name is TitzUp!
wow! (Score:2)
That is WAC! Does this mean JIL is into BONDI?!? OMFG!
.deb and Qt, please (Score:5, Interesting)
Now if only they will bring back Maemo's Debian-based package management and properly maintained Qt support to their native applications, and it will be back to the direction where Maemo was supposed to be heading before Nokia fucked up.
Making it possible to merge at least some things that are now maintained in Maemo Community SSU [maemo.org] (last updated September 7 2011 if anyone did not notice), would be nice, too, however there certainly will be incompatibility with that.
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However, be warned, even though it's based on
Boot2Gecko (Score:2)
So we've actually 2 open source and open development players in the field now, although both are yet-to-be-released.
Both use HTML5 as backend for everything.
Let's see how it works out :P
Bad news (Score:1)
FAIL + FAIL = FAIL (Score:2)
How exactly are Tizer.. I mean Tizen hoping to promote this? "It's a bit like Android but it's not Android"?
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Netscape failed. Then we got Firefox out of that failing project.
Chrome could get a noticeable part of the market-share and mind-share when there was too many web browsers already (MSIE, Firefox-and-XUL-brothers, Safari-and-KHTML-brothers, Opera).
It's not impossible that Tizen finds a niche large enough to become the libre software platform we all want; Android future doesn't seem promising, freedom-wise.
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There is already a Linux platform for small devices, it is called Angstrom, it is based on OpenEmbedded, and it runs on a bunch of ARM-based PDAs, on bog-standard PCs, and lots of other devices besides. If half of the work that went into Moblin, MeeGo, and all this other nonsense had gone into Angstrom, we could all be using it now.
Prescient Name (Score:2)
Qt-based development (Score:2)
What options does this leave for Qt-based development on embedded platforms?
Maemo [nokia.com] on the N900 felt like the right direction with Nokia backing Qt, especially with projects like PySide [pyside.org] created soley to offer a LGPL-licensed Python wrapper available to commercial developers (as opposed to PyQt [riverbankcomputing.co.uk]). This permitted a single codebase to target desktop and mobile/tablet environments using a pleasant and completely open toolchain. MeeGo was set to carry on with Qt/X11.
But according to MeeGo's updated website [meego.com], "We
The QT question (Score:2)
Reading around in the Meego Forum Thread [meego.com] on this topic, I found the following tidbits:
1-They are trying to dodge the MeeGo question, as asked directly in this [meego.com] IRC chat
2-Nokia have also noticed this, as seen by this tweet [twitter.com] by a guy for for Qt/MeeGo at Nokia.
3-However, a Company called Novomok will provide [nomovok.com] Tizen with Qt, so...huh?
4- Also, Intel App up will be supported [intel.com], and that's based on Qt apps, so yeah.
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From MeeGo merges with LiMo to form Tizen [allaboutmeego.com]
What role for Qt?
The future of Qt in relation to Tizen is uncertain. It was not mentioned in any of today’s press releases. The Tizen website does make reference to a native development, but does not provide any further details. Instead HTML 5 is promoted as the development environment of choice and in an elastic piece of thinking is given as the reason for the need to evolve MeeGo.
However, Qt is a key component in many MeeGo related projects (e.g. part of t
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That's too bad. Qt was one thing that made MeeGo attractive. Whereas yet-another-HTML5-app-platform? (given that you can already do this on all existing ones)
Oh, and good luck competing with Win8 on tablets and netbooks.
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It seems likely that politics has a role to play here. Qt came into the MeeGo project from Nokia. Despite recent moves towards open governance, is still very much associated with Nokia. Intel were unhappy that Nokia switched to Windows Phone and the member of LiMo (including Samsung) may prefer to avoid mentioning or relying on what is perceived to be a competitor's asset.
Not just that. Samsung has been sponsoring Enlightenment, [phoronix.com] and they may see it as being better for low-powered devices than Qt.
No details yet (Score:2)
The tizen.org site says:
The rest of it reads like a draft outline of a requirements spec. I was just curious to find out if this will still be a downstream of Fedora, but not even that is on there.
So, yay, some people are getting together to work on a joint OS. I suggest they get something out that people can actually install if they want to gain some traction.
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MeeGo wasn't a downstream of RedHat. It just used RPMs for packaging. It was a downstream of OpenEmbedded that was tagged from out of OpenedHand's Poky Linux system.
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MeeGo wasn't a downstream of RedHat.
Not Redhat, Fedora (Redhat is a downstream of Fedora). I got that idea from this [fedoraproject.org] but in context, perhaps what that's really saying is that it's a port of MeeGo onto Fedora.
Translation: (Score:2)
Adios MeeGo!
Nokia is doing what Apple was doing to itself (Score:2)
In the early nineties Apple was trying to get more leverage for its platforms by letting others in on its fantastic architecture and OS. Steve Jobs proved this to be a mistake. Noka is repeating it. I wonder when they wake up. Intel was never on the bandwagon. Maemo was one polished system. The Intel lever was as necessary as a fifth wheel on a cart.
Nokia = Amiga for a new generation (Score:3, Funny)
I had an Amiga 1000... loved it (superior in sooooo many ways) ! Then Commodore blew it.
Then I had the Nokia 770... loved it! But, Nokia never really did anything with it
Then I got the Nokia N800
Then I saw the N9... I want it... then Nokia Blows it before even releasing it
WTF?!?!?
hmmmm... I bet the problem is me...
I formally apologize for liking Nokia.
Now...maybe they can get their head out of their butts.
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You know there was an alternative, right? I switched to WebOS after N800 and bought a Pre 3. HP blew that the next day. Still loving the phone though.
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(I like HP too...see where that gets me)
Another native-as-an-afterthought platform? (Score:2)
From the Tizen announcement:
This is what made me not interested in WebOS. IIRC, they added support for native code soon after, but, initially, they pushed it as a HTML+JavaScript platform. We already have that. And I don't want it.
Fortunately, they also write:
Intel wanted native (Score:2)
I assisted to one of the Intel MeeGo/AppUp events, and they clearly stated:
And that made sense to me. By lowering the costs of the software, they can make really cheap devices, like the EEE PC X101 (200 USD or 179 EURO). Also, if almost all the code is native, they can provide their software products and services not only to device manufacturers, but also to developers (e.g., a very specialiced compiler/debugger/profiler
suse invite meego (Score:1)
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Oh man... Android is FAR from unprofitable for Google. Sure, the OS itself doesn't generate any revenue, but it's a platform Google has control over (that alone is invaluable) and with which they can push their shit your way (more $ there).
Android is the proverbial cheap razor that allows Google to sell blades.
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Just like Java were for Sun, which did not end up well.
Re:Android is next... (Score:5, Informative)
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Every time you touch that search button on your Android phone it makes Google very happy.
It does? Because my search button directs its search to DuckDuckGo.
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Just like Java were for Sun, which did not end up well.
Java was never a platform except for some horribly failed "Java Desktop System", it's a programming language. Microsoft makes .NET to sell Windows. Apple makes iOS to sell iDevices, Google makes Android to push Google services, Sun made Java to do what exactly? I never figured it out, they never seemed to get any real kickback from people using Java. No hardware sales, no software sales, no licensing fees, no split of any profits of anything built using Java that I can tell. Don't get me wrong, it was nice
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Sun made Java to do what exactly?
Initially it was for television-based devices.
I never figured it out, they never seemed to get any real kickback from people using Java. No hardware sales, no software sales, no licensing fees, no split of any profits of anything built using Java that I can tell.
They licensed [cnet.com] it to mobile devices, and I think some other partners as well:
"That had become lucrative: a source familiar with Sun's Java work said royalty payments for mobile Java was the dominant part of the hundreds of millions of dollars a year Sun took garnered in Java revenue. "
You're right, though, that for as big as Java was brand-wise, they didn't profit all that much. Then again, they ended up being bought by Oracle for a lot of money, and a big part o
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It is the most popular platform for enterprise/cloud computing.
Well everybody said it was cross-platform, so is it a platform on top of a platform then? Guess that depends on your definition.
Really ? How many users of windows even know/heard of .NET ?
Okay maybe I didn't explain it clearly. Users care about applications, application developers care about platforms. Making .NET => Windows applications => Windows sales.
Promote their server sales, which worked for a while until other server vendors caught on.
I would wager that even at the height 99%+ of all Java apps didn't run on a Sun server. Was the Sparc JVM superior to the others in any way? Not that I heard of...
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Actually they get money for each device that has the Google market, which they then also get a cut of sales.
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Apparently it is also profitable for Microsoft as well.
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What made maemo a so nice platform? Simple: it's support for Qt, GTK, Python, PulseAudio, and other standards we already have in Linux. There was no need to write new application, just a bit of redesign of t
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You should probably take a step out of the cave you spent the last ten years in and have a look around at reality.
HTML5+JavaScript+etc. are absolutely great for programming a GUI. You might be confusing the GUI with the backend behind.
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Why would any developers want to write in HTML5?
It's easier. Easier = more apps = more revenue for whoever's running the app store.
It seems unlikely that they'll write their own rendering engine or switch the whole project over to GTK, so probably this will be running WebKit on Qt. Perhaps even on XCB if they're feeling ambitious - Qt on X11 suffers from layering performance problems (one of the Qt devs has a good blog post on all the inefficiencies from the driver layer on up).