Henri Bergius - Meego

Jolla's Sailfish OS

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

This week has been a busy one for a hacker-nomad. Weekend in Paris for the JS.everywhere conference, then on Monday a talk at the Hamburg JavaScript meetup. And now I'm in Helsinki. Slush, the conference I'm attending, is the biggest start-up event in Nordic countries. But even at that, it seems the Jolla announcements of today have been able to hijack most of the buzz around the event.

Thanks to the kind invitation from the Jolla team, I will spend today in the conference. This post will include the things I learn about Sailfish, their new mobile OS. I've been equipped with a list of questions from the Maemo community, and will try to pry answers to some of those during the day. In the meanwhile, I recommend reading my Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora post before this one to get the background on where Jolla comes from.

What to expect from the day

Unlike with the smartphone giants, relatively little has leaked out on what Jolla will show us today. What we know is that they are working on a new OS for smartphones based on Mer and Qt. During Slush they will show the user interface and the SDK, but there should be no hardware announcements yet.

Jolla Tides has a list of various gossip about the event. We'll see how much of that holds true.

Before the opening session

I arrived at Slush right around when the doors opened. Quite a few members of the Jolla team were there already to set up their booth and prepare for the keynote. Looking at all the familiar faces makes this feel very much like a Maemo family gathering.

The Jolla booth is right next to the main entrance. And there are stickers:

Before the event started, Jolla's CEO Marc Dillon shared the stage in the opening press conference with other Finnish start-up notables like Peter Vesterbacka from Rovio.

Jolla has grown very quickly from a start-up to a medium-sized technology company.

I think everybody who plays Angry Birds should get a Jolla phone

The fact that Finland's prime minister will be opening the actual event shows how important innovative new companies like Jolla are for the nation.

Opening session

Peter Vesterbacka:

This is not California. Most of the year it is cold, dark, and there is slush on the ground. But this is also an advantage. You have time to build amazing things like IRC, Linux, or Angry Birds

In addition to Finnish companies, there are also 100 Russian start-ups attending.

If you look at the markets nearby, there are places like Russia and China practically next door.

Jyrki Katainen, Finnish PM:

I've never before been in an event where the prime minister's nails get painted. Innovation.

But seriously, we as a country have been losing market share in many important markets. The ways to solve this is through research and entrepreneurship. The focus on R&D was what lifted Finland from the recession of the early 90s. We want to become the largest hub of start-ups in Northern Europe. We need to create an atmosphere where new entrepreneurs and venture capitalists can meet in easier ways.

Before the keynote

Jolla's website is finally up at http://jolla.com/. The website is also showing the event livestream:

There is also a wiki for Sailfish OS now available.

Another exciting pre-keynote announcement is that Finnish operator DNA will sell Jolla phones.

This is also interesting, if true:

Jolla launch keynote

A video of the launch keynote is available on YouTube.

2013 will not be like 2013

The whole company came on stage, and each team was introduced with words like:

Here is the team that designs the most innovative user experience. We have the team that works to put Sailfish on all sorts of hardware. All hardware, whether high or low end, has been performing extremely well with Sailfish. We've been responsible for finding the best engineering talent in the world. We take care of systems, tools, and automation -- yeah, we build robots

Marc Dillon:

We have the world's best community behind us. There is such a need for another player in the mobile space. People need change, people need openness

We want to be a company that sells a great user experience, a great operating system. Jolla is not a company. Jolla is a movement

Jolla wants to add more partners to the ecosystem, and to ensure it is an open ecosystem where companies can put Sailfish on different kinds of devices, and create new things on the platform.

It is a lot of fun what we do every day. I work with the greatest people in the world. The UI should also be fun for the users, for the consumers. We're out there creating friendships and partnerships. It is all about working bilaterally.

We've seen a company to build a business out of apps, and another company follow them on their terms. We don't have to do that.

The governance of Sailfish is about contributing. If a company wants to add a new technology or a standard, we're open for that.

China is the first market for Jolla. Sami Pienimäki on stage:

We're taking Finnish design and bringing it to China. Many people around the world have told us that what you're trying can't be done, that there is a Red Sea to block you. But China is the most dynamic market in the world. You need to listen carefully and be polite, and always learn. The management team is constantly on the field. You can't outsource this, you need to feel it yourself

"China is a big country inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles de Gaulle. "No problem" - Chinese saying

Stefano Mosconi:

Our guys are really staying up until 4am to see that we have Sailfish OS booting on the new hardware. This doesn't happen every day. This is Open Source, it is stubborness, it is great engineering. Open Source is about doing stuff.

What if you could watch the development of the OS out in the open, and adapt your application little by little, instead of having to wait for the big code drop? Sailfish is the first mobile operating system that is really open 24 hours for your contributions, and your enjoyment.

You out there are the interconnected organisms. We want to swim in the Open Source, we want to live and breath it. And when you're in the ecosystem, you can contribute, you can affect the way things go.

The SDK is based on Qt Creator and will be shown tomorrow.

Antti Saarnio:

There will be Jolla-branded phones, always leading by example. They will be the spearhead of the Sailfish ecosystem. But partners and operators can also sell Sailfish phones on their own branding. Other smartphone vendors can also use Sailfish. We're talking with several companies about this.

This industry is at the moment looking for change. Jolla and its partners can be the change by disrupting how the industry works. We don't have an existing business or cost base to defend.

UI demo

Marc back on stage, showing the Jolla UI video. There was an Android logo in one of the screenshots!

Two taps on the screen activate the lockscreen. Scroll up and you'll see status information, and finally get to the homescreen. Swiping up again goes to the apps listing.

Sailfish has true multitasking, just like N9 or N900 had. When you open an application, the homescreen will have a large widget-like tile showing it. These widgets show status data from the app, and can have controls for the app, like pausing or forwarding music you're listening to.

This is true multi-tasking. You no longer have to go deep into an application to do something. You can leave your favorite applications open all the time.

Swiping gestures change between views inside an app.

The whole UI takes its ambience, its color scheme out of the picture you choose for the wallpaper.

Swiping down from the homescreen brings you back to the lock screen, and swiping down again locks. So the whole UI is spatial

Interview

I had a chance to sit down and talk briefly with Sami Pienimäki, Harri Hakulinen, and Carsten Munk from the Jolla team. The Maemo community (and commenters of this blog post) had provided me with a set of questions, and here are answers to some of them.

In general, the Jolla team was very happy with the demo and the keynote, stuff worked and people were interested, both on-site and online.

There is much more to the UX than was shown yet

For developers, the interesting part is the platform itself. Mer is the core OS used, with various middleware pieces coming from the Nemo project. Qt Creator is used for building applications, with the Sailfish SDK being shown tomorrow.

Qt/QML story is the main story. And then a set of Linux APIs that make sense

I asked about the Android logo in the demo video. It seems it was an easter egg that most people noticed, probably because the logo is so common nowadays. The answer:

You can run Android applications on Sailfish. But native tools are encouraged. Sailfish can run Android apps but is not Android. More integrated UI needs Qt.

And the application story stretches beyond just Qt and Android APIs. You can also deploy HTML5 apps via PhoneGap, as Qt Cordova runs already on Sailfish.

We don't like to talk about security frameworks. We talk about user privacy frameworks. The OS will protect user privacy. User privacy framework will be open sourced I also enquired about various things about the form factor that will be relevant to developers, like screen sizes and HW/SW keyboards, but there have been no HW announcements yet -- as expected. The first Jolla device will probably be out in the summer, at least for customers in China and Finland. There are ongoing negotiations also with other European channels.

There may be a N900-like developer device program, but this depends on the partners. They want to ensure a program would make sense for both them, the developer community, and the operator partners out there.

Sailfish supports chipsets from ST Ericsson, and can already run also on other chipsets, as well as a VM. ST Ericsson's Snowball is a developer device that you can buy.

Intermission. On the way to a meeting between the sessions I walked past the former Nokia Research Center building in Ruoholahti. It felt weird to see the place without the familiar logos...

Sailfish UI session

In the evening Jolla's design team held another session on the Sailfish UI and the design philosophy behind it. The basic ideas behind it are simplicity and playfullness.

Smartphones in general are getting bigger, but the UI has to fit your hand without having to use it with two hands or shift the device around.

Multitasking is important. Normally, the apps take a full screen, but each of them also appears as a widget when either running or pinned to the homescreen. These widgets can present UI elements or data. No chrome where you want to just show content.

The OS tries to be personal and customizable, unlike others.

We decided to abandon classical UI chrome and high-production visuals. Only using plain visuals would be boring. You need ambience. Everyone will bring their unique touch on how their UI looks. To stand in the crowd but stand out

Honesty to the medium, which in case of current smartphones means glass. So, no fake leather or 3D icons.

Vertical swipes take you between the lockscreen on the top, homescreen in middle, and app list in the bottom. Swiping left and right shows various views of an app. There are also gestures to show available actions, like changing between a VoIP or a regular cellular call. The Jolla team called these different views covers, and swiping pushing.

Even the lockscreen has some UI options available via swipes, for example to switch the phone to silent mode.

Continuous integration

Everybody in Jolla team tests their work on actual devices, and gets constant updates on them. This way you can ensure performance stays smooth even on 100$ hardware. QML helps too.

Thursday: Jolla SDK session

Unfortunately I had to fly back to Berlin in the morning, but Jens Wiik agreed to write a report for this blog from the SDK session. The story below is from him:

Today's major Jolla event was the SDK demo.

Watching the presentation, I felt like I'd already seen the same thing ten times. And I have.

Which is awesome.

Anyone familiar with Qt and Qt Quick should feel right at home. Qt Mobility is available as well. As far as the individual app developer is concerned, Jolla isn't making any radical departures from the existing frameworks. It remains an excellent way to develop a slick UI, regardless of whether you want to follow platform guidelines or customize everything (more on that later).

The SDK is available in source form now, and we should expect binaries for multiple platforms in the coming weeks (a minor disappointment, but no big deal). Qt Creator lets you deploy your code directly to virtual machines or real devices, and you'll be seeing stronger integration of Sailfish UI components in the near future.

Jolla also encouraged anyone with questions about the build system to contact them. They want to make it easy to support multiple architectures, and even multiple versions of Qt.

The number one thing to remember from this demo is that Jolla is open to people joining discussions online, and in fact strongly encourages it. They said they'd be very welcoming to people who show up on IRC with a good attitude, and want to release preview code early and often so you can help make it fit your needs before it becomes a more strictly defined finished product.

At the event, anyone could have walked up to the CEO and talked to him:

Android compatibility can be achieved in three ways:

Apps developed using the SDK are Qt apps that can be run on Android.
Many Android apps will already run on Sailfish due to an included VM.
A lot of info will be available about porting apps to get native performance.

The rest of the presentation introduced Qt Quick to those who haven't seen it before. The following screenshots illustrate how to create a simple gallery app that adapts to the user's theme (ambience).

A basic window:

QtMobility for finding the pictures, and a gridview for displaying them:

Adding the Sailfish PullDownMenu is also just a few lines of code:

And the final result, with the menu pulled down, now used for changing sorting order in the demo's gridview:

All in all, getting to that point took about twenty minutes, with Jolla estimating that it should take about an hour without preparation. You even get lots of animations for free by using the provided components.

My personal impressions about Qt Quick are as positive as ever. But seeing this presentation from Jolla instead of Nokia felt different - in a good way.

Thanks, Jens! And also thanks to the Jolla team for the interesting presentations and the discussions in the Supercell party last night.

The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Much has been written about the emerging Post-PC era, about the new possibilities it brings, and the limitations it imposes on developer creativity.

For a while I've been planning to record my own experiences of the mobile revolution through the lense of the Maemo mobile Linux ecosystem. This is much in the same spirit as Texrat's excellent piece. Today's news made this even more urgent, and so here it is.

New Hope, a Linux computer in every pocket

For starters it ought to be said that I'm not a newcomer to the mobile Internet. Back in 1998 I was already blogging on an Internet-connected Psion PDA, and by early 2000s we were routinely publishing our travel journals this way. But even after the Psion experiences, Maemo was something special.

Glimpse of a tablet future

The real mobile story for me started only with Nokia's Internet Tablets and Maemo in 2006:

I had the Nokia 770 web browser device waiting on my desk as I returned from South Africa. 770 is a nice, small, Linux-powered internet appliance that is able to utilize either a WLAN connection, or mobile phone's connection via Bluetooth.

The device is compact and lightweight enough to be basically carried all the time. It also has a screen good enough for reading almost any websites. These two factors serve to make web and RSS feeds ubiquitously available, opening interesting possibilities

No wonder we felt it to be the real-world Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

However, Douglas Adams didn’t probably have in mind what would be really possible today, a joke that was written back then is now reality. What is 770 + Internet + Wikipedia? Quite much same as Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy. An electronic device that can answer to all your questions anywhere anytime. It is not Sci-Fi anylonger, but Nokia 770 Internet Tablet...

Many of the things people associate with iPad were already common for us in the old Internet Tablet times. I was getting my morning news on the 770 with Google Reader just like I now do with Pulse on an Android tablet, and I was sharing my location with friends via Plazes like people now do with Foursquare. The only difference is that back then the tablets were for a bit more exclusive club of Linux enthusiasts.

Community jumps in

The early stages of Maemo were important learning experiences for how a big mobile player could interact with the free software community. While not everything went perfectly, the 770 very quickly gained an active community of developers around it.

Next software updates to the device brought VoIP and instant messaging to the device, and the community brought mobile maps (later on Maemo Mapper would go with the more legit option of OpenStreetMap). The instant messaging capability proved itself useful very quickly:

We spent the last two days driving from Helsinki to Poznan, Poland for the Midgard Developer Meeting. This proved to be a good field test for Maemo 2.0 as we needed to instruct people back home about some project details using Google Talk.

The media capabilities on the 770 also made it possible to watch movies on the tablet.

Helping to run the community

Until this point we had been just regular community members, using our tablets for various purposes, and even writing some simple pieces of software for it. But in late 2006 our involvement in the community deepened extensively, as our Midgard system was selected for running much of the community infrastructure:

We have conducted a study on migrating/integrating all existing services of maemo.org with the Midgard CMS framework. Based on the study we have decided to go ahead and setup the new environment ... Nemein is participating in the project as the Midgard expert organization.

Those interested in the history of Midgard may find the Maemo-Midgard feasibility study worth a read.

For us this was a great fit: many Midgard developers were already fans of Maemo, and Nokia's plan was to run the community infrastructure in an open manner. This meant most of the code was made Open Source, and when possible contributed to Midgard and other upstream projects.

We were joined by excellent people like Niels, Ferenc, and Reggie, and have been running the community infrastructure ever since. In time we would introduce useful new services like social news aggregation, karma, brainstorming, and the hugely succesful Maemo Downloads of which I will talk more later.

Maemo becomes more mainstream

While the 770 had clearly been a hacker device, it was soon followed by the N800 with a cool 70s retro design. While I don't know the actual sales numbers, the N800 was advertised quite actively, and held the sixth place in Amazon sales rankings for all computers.

This was the tablet that really got creativity flowing. We quickly brought location-awareness to it with the Plazes social network, and others in the community made blogging on the N800 possible.

DeviceScape brought another feature: WiFi autologins to pass those annoying captive portals many public access points have. While iOS devices now automatically pop up the authentication dialog in such situations, it is weird that even now this isn't a common feature in mobile OSs.

Later on I gave my old N800 to my mother and she wrote about her experiences with it:

Our Internet tablet is present almost imperceptibly in our life from dawn till dusk. It wakes us up in the morning, and tells news in the evening. It is small and stylish, and it mixes well with the environment.

Its utilities include e.g. a browser for surfing the net, Skype for phone calls, and several radios. Its smallness allows it to be enjoyed together, not separately as often happens with our personal computers. Several times a day we look at weather information, and TV programme guides. Also we use it in looking for dogs in need of home, this being the most important project at the moment.

Sounds quite iPad-esque, doesn't it?

Since Internet Tablets were still a new thing, lots of experiments were happening with them. We ported the CouchDB NoSQL database to the device, and it wasn't uncommon to see robots driven by the device:

Universal communicator

The Nokia N810 entered the picture in late 2007, bringing a hardware keyboard to the Maemo land. This would be the device I dubbed the Universal Communicator and would use as my primary computer on travels:

And I'm not talking about vodka this time, but instead about the latest internet tablet from Nokia, the N810. I've now had the device for some weeks, and it has really started to replace the laptop in many situations.

The idea of an universal communicator is a mobile device that can be used to connect with various communication networks including telephone, instant messaging and social networks. After the latest Internet Communications Software Update, the N810 fits the description quite well

I wasn't the only one seeing the future potential of Internet Tablets. Around this time companies like Rhapsody started experimenting with mobile strategies using the Maemo tablets as testbeds.

Mozilla was also finding their mobile story with their Fennec browser on the N810, a development that would later on result in their highly promising Firefox OS effort. Again we Maemo users were getting a preview of the future.

Even with all this, the communication features of the N810 were a key. I still fondly remember having a N810-to-N810 video call from an Internet cafe in Amsterdam with my girlfriend after my phone had been stolen in the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit...

GeoClue and Summer of Code

Another big feature in N810 was that it had a GPS. Suddenly we would have Nokia Maps everywhere.

This was the time when I was very interested in location-based services. By knowing where it was, a device could act as a travel guide, help to sort out logistics, guide people through public transport, and much more.

Soon there appeared an opportunity to push these ideas forward:

I was a mentor in the maemo project of Google SoC 2007. The project I mentored was Jussi Kukkonen's work on porting GeoClue to Maemo. While in the end Nokia decided to go proprietary with their positioning framework, as result of the SoC project we got GeoClue into GNOME Mobile and Jussi got a job in the field. Via the GNOME Mobile stack, GeoClue is already in at least one device on the market

As the interest in GeoClue grew, I would spend the next couple of years traveling to conferences to give talks on it. Eventually GeoClue would be adopted by most major Linux distributions, and MeeGo.

While some of the more ambitious ideas would only emerge in later services like Google Now, location awareness enabled our tablets to do interesting things, like mobile map making.

Step 4 of 5

2009 was a big shift in Maemo land through the release of the Nokia N900. Now our beloved tablet had become a smartphone! And not just any kind of smartphone, but a fully open and hackable one:

Maemo 5 is a computer platform that happens to fit in your pocket: OMAP Linux Kernel, Xorg server, GStreamer, Telepathy, Tracker, GTK+ (Qt also available) and many more. The telephony stack is also there and SMS also works, but this doesn’t mean that Maemo is now transformed into a smartphone platform. Landscape mode by default, 800×480 amazing display, full qwerty hardware keyboard, a Mozilla based browser providing you the WWW as you are used to get it… We are just expanding the concept of what features a computer that is always with you is supposed to have.

If freedom is your concern then you don’t need to “unlock” or “jailbreak” Maemo 5. From installing an application to getting root access, it’s you who decide. We trust you, and at the end it’s your device. Nokia also trusts the open source community in general and the Maemo community particularly helping in getting casual users through the experience path. The N900 might just be a new and successful entry point for a new wave of open source users and developers.

While the N900 brought a rift into the Maemo community through the older Internet Tablets not being upgradeable to the latest software, it was also an amazing device. With it you would a always-connected device in your pocket with a desktop-grade browser and a full Linux system on it.

For the next couple of years, this would be the device I would carry everywhere, and do almost everything with. I had a full offline copy of Wikipedia to guide me, it talked to Qaiku, the social network we were working on back then.

And most importantly, it had a great camera. With the Frankencamera drivers the phone would often take much better pictures than my real camera. Or what would you say of the depth in this one?

Despite all the advances in smartphone hardware and software since 2009, I still know many people who couldn't consider using any other phone than the N900. This was and is the only smartphone that you could actually make your own.

Maemo Downloads

The N900 was the time when Maemo Downloads really got the chance to shine. Here we had an excellent smartphone, but with a rather lacking official application offering. And so the community stepped in, and started producing a wide range of interesting apps for the device.

One innovative aspect of the Downloads service was how we did quality assurance:

We had a session about application QA in last weekend's GSoC Mentor Summit. I explained how the Maemo Downloads approval process works in a completely open, crowdsourced way. This differs from many distributions where approval of new packages involves obscure decisions and secret handshakes.

The service became quite popular, and by February 2010 we were able to celebrate serving 3.5 million downloads. And this was by far not the end. As of today, the total download count stands at 124 million, with the most popular apps standing around 1 million. Not bad for one device!

Since then, the Maemo Downloads service was also ported for MeeGo with a slick on-device installer client powered by Open Collaboration Services.

Enter MeeGo

In February 2010 I was returning on an early flight from London. When we landed to Helsinki, an ominous SMS was waiting for me on the phone:

Get online. This will wake you up

While I had been traveling, Nokia and Intel had announced joining forces to form MeeGo, a new mobile Operating System. This was a time when nobody was sure what would happen. Would we shut down Maemo and migrate everybody to the MeeGo infrastructure? What infrastructure would MeeGo need? Would there be a common user identity?

Eventually much of these questions would get sorted out. MeeGo would largely run its own infrastructure, but with several of the good parts, like Social News and Downloads copied over.

One effect of the MeeGo transition was that conferences became more grandiose. Suddenly we were holding presentations in football stadiums and major hotels, with the conference parties having whole breweries booked for them. And conference handouts were getting better as well, with people getting tablets and MeeGo netbooks to develop with. The going joke was that next year we'll all get a MeeGo-powered car.

At the same time, MeeGo's wider focus meant that suddenly we were talking about adapting our software to very different environments, from big tablets to smartphones and in-vehicle infotainment systems. We even deployed MeeGo on interactive information displays:

A major part of MeeGo was Nokia's ongoing Harmattan work, which would eventually produce the N9, a widely-praised and slick all-touch smartphone:

The N9 is flawed and doomed, but you have to understand, I don’t care. The overriding experience of using this phone is one of delight and desire. Yes, it can get bamboozled and freeze up, and no, you won’t be finding an avalanche of awesome new apps for it, but those downsides fade in comparison to the abundance of positives. The Harmattan UI is fresh, slick, and as natural as anything the smartphone world has yet introduced, while the physical design is unmatched. Not even the shiny new iPhone 4S feels as luxurious in the hand as the N9. I started off by comparing Nokia’s latest handset to a supercar and the parallels run deep. Like Italy’s finest mechanical produce, the N9 won’t be found in many shops, has a tendency to break down, and inspires an emotional rather than pragmatical response. There’s an added underdog charm in knowing it has been discarded by its maker and deemed unworthy to carry the Nokia crown.

For much of its time, MeeGo was widely misunderstood as Android without Java. I sought to set the record straight in my Understanding MeeGo post from June 2011:

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.

Empire Strikes Back, the mobile Linux winter

By the late summer of 2011 both MeeGo and webOS were dead. MeeGo because Nokia entered the world of Redmond, and webOS largely because HP couldn't decide what they wanted to be when they grew up.

Tizen was launched on the ashes of MeeGo, with essentially similar plans and ambitions, but with every instance of Nokia and Qt replaced with Samsung and EFL, and obviously causing yet another costly rewrite. I can only imagine how industrial vendors like car manufacturers felt, with long-advanced MeeGo based product plans and the rug suddenly pulled from under them. However, the jury is still out on whether Tizen will succeed or not.

Ever since the open mobile ecosystems of were killed, I've been appalled of the direction this "Post-PC era" is taking us. Through patent wars and locked-down app stores, the world of mobile software is becoming a power play where some win big and everybody else loses.

This is largely the reason why I now carry a humble Symbian device instead of the current breed of smartphones. The existing mobile ecosystems are either too dystopic or in turmoil for me to get involved in any of them.

App Stores are the new record labels

As much of software is about disintermediation, of making the world run more smoothly through removal of middlemen, it is interesting that we software developers are now driving ourselves to a world full of middlemen. A world where we suddenly have to ask for a permission to do something new.

In a world where everything must go through the rules and regulations of an app store without any oversight we, the developers, will suddenly be in the same abused stage as artists are with their labels. We take all the risk and all the effort on building software for our users. The middleman then can invalidate all our hard work by arbitrarily making it impossible for their ecosystem to run the app. And even if they do accept the software, they'll take a hefty cut of the proceeds.

How can this make sense to an independent developer?

Universal runtimes

Many of us have started our programming careers in a free world. Whether we were building software for Linux, Windows, Mac, or the Web, we could largely do anything there. We could publish the software under a free license, charge license fees, or provide it as a rental service. And the only limiting factor would be whether our potential users liked the software or not.

The fever of a mobile app gold rush has made many throw away those freedoms. With 60% of developers losing money in the process this seems hardly worth it.

As desktop and mobile are being locked up behind anti-competitive restrictions, often justified in the name of security, many developers are drawn to the last open frontier, the Web. I've addressed this in more detail in The Universal Runtime, but Y-Combinator's Paul Graham said it well already back in 2001:

How will it all play out? I don't know. And you don't have to know if you bet on Web-based applications. No one can break that without breaking browsing. The Web may not be the only way to deliver software, but it's one that works now and will continue to work for a long time. Web-based applications are cheap to develop, and easy for even the smallest startup to deliver. They're a lot of work, and of a particularly stressful kind, but that only makes the odds better for startups.

Return of the MeeGo

For supporters of free software, the last year has been looking quite grim. Desktop becoming irrelevant, mobile becoming more and more closed. Instead of quietly giving up, some saw this as an opportunity to fight back and build something new. In Where is the future for openness in mobile, I wrote:

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.

In FOSDEM last winter I helped to organize a Open Mobile Linux track with the goal of bringing together the people involved in building an open version of the Post-PC future. I thought that with what had happened to MeeGo and webOS, there would be very little interest. Instead, the track was very lively, and we even had to turn people away to remain within the limits of fire safety regulations!

While the common view seems to be that the future is shared between Android and iOS, there have been some bold attempts at tablets powered by free software. And of course there is today's big announcement:

Jolla

I had been hearing rumors of something happening in the post-MeeGo space for a while, and today it seems it was finally time to make things public. The JollaMobile Twitter account went live with the following announcement:

As can be expected, this brought a lot of notice on Twitter, as well as on Maemo forums and tech blogs. Much of the Jolla plans are still secret, and there isn't the kind of community infrastructure we from Maemo have been used to. But I'm sure these areas will become more clear as time progresses.

From Jolla's first press release:

Nokia created something wonderful – the world's best smartphone product. It deserves to be continued, and we will do that together with all the bright and gifted people contributing to the MeeGo success story.

Together with international investors and partners, Jolla Ltd. will design, develop and sell new MeeGo based smartphones. The Jolla team consists of a substantial number of MeeGo’s core engineers and directors, and is aggressively hiring the top MeeGo talent to contribute to the next generation smartphone production.

Indeed it appears Jolla has learned many lessons from the earlier stages of the MeeGo story. Instead of reinventing all the wheels, they're working together with many of the existing players, including the Mer Project. Carsten Munk explains:

And for the record, JollaMobile is not Mer. Mer is not JollaMobile. JollaMobile uses and contributes to Mer. Mer is a mobile core (without UIs and Hardware adaptations), usable and used by many different companies, with many different contributors.

Will all of this work? Who knows, the world of mobile is a difficult one, with many failed efforts in its history. The things going for Jolla are a the excellent technical base of Linux, Mer, and Qt, the battle-scarred people who were able to produce the excellent Nokia N9 phone, and hopefully the existing Maemo community.

I wish them luck in their endeavors, and look forward to the day when I can again proudly show my MeeGon:

I've been writing this story on a stormy Berlin weekend, wearing my Mer Project T-shirt, and watching my Twitter feed fill up with supportive comments on Jolla and Mer. Exciting times!

Open Advice

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

I seem to have not blogged about this, but Open Advice, our book on Free and Open Source Software: what we wish we had known when we started, was published last month.

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!

Open Mobile Linux, this Saturday in FOSDEM

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

As mentioned in the earlier call for presentations, we're running a track on Open Mobile Linux in FOSDEM this Saturday. Room AW1.120 at the ULB campus in Brussels. From the CfP:

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!

Call for presentations: Open Mobile Linux at FOSDEM 2012

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

At FOSDEM 2012 we will have a devroom related to Open Mobile Linux. 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.

We have the room AW1.120 with 74 seats, a video projector (VGA), wireless internet on Saturday 4th February for a total of 8 hours.

The format we will be utilizing is lightning talks of length 15 minutes with 10 minutes of questions, 5 minute changeover to next speaker. Our goal is about 15 talks during the day.

The motivation is that after each talk, you and your project will be visible to the rest of the Open Mobile Linux community and further deeper discussions into your topic with your peers can continue outside the devroom.

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.

Where is the future for openness in mobile?

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

These are tough times for fans of open mobile environments. Android is less and less open, Symbian was closed again, HP stopped making webOS devices, and now Intel abandoned MeeGo to work with Samsung and operators instead. So, what is the community to do?

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.

Nemein and Infigo merge to create a digital agency focused on web and mobile

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Yesterday the contracts were signed to acquire Infigo as part of Nemein. Infigo, is a consulting company focused on mobile development and web using open source tools. You'll probably at least know their CTO, Jerry of the USB finger fame.

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.

Understanding MeeGo

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Disclaimer: I'm a software developer with a background in Nokia's Maemo mobile Linux ecosystem. I've built both software and community services for it. As a Maemo enthusiast, I've also been following MeeGo with interest, and am helping to build some of the project infrastructure there as well. But I do not speak with the authority of the MeeGo project, and what is written below is my personal view into what MeeGo is.

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.

Update: everything written in this blog post should be applied to Mer Project as the proper heir of MeeGo.

Going to San Francisco

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Tue, 17 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

This weekend, after Falsy Values, I will be flying to San Francisco for a couple of weeks. There are some conferences:

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

However, as there is quite some time between these two events, it would be interesting to meet cool people and/or projects. So if you're in the area, drop me a note.

Smartphone that doesn't need an App Store

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

True disruption would be a smartphone that doesn’t need an App Store

—Nokia Fellow Mikko Terho, speaking in the Finnish MeeGo Summit. Rhymes quite well with the ideas of a Universal Runtime.