hildon gnome org

[Carlos Guerreiro <carlos guerreiro nokia com>]

Hi,

Ever since the first release of Maemo for the Nokia 770,
Hildon has been an open piece of code released under the LGPL.
The intention has been from the outset to allow developers
outside of Nokia to peek into the internals of Hildon and help
themselves.

That initial release of Hildon was a one-off drop of code dependent
on a heavily modified gtk+ and on other specifics of Maemo.

Since then, a lot of effort has been put on improving Hildon's
alignment with gtk+ and GNOME by aggressively reducing our
patch against gtk+ and Hildon's dependencies on Maemo specifics.

At the same time, the code was moved out to a public svn repository
where it is developed in the open [1], the public maemo bugzilla
has been increasingly used and development discussions have been
slowing moving to the open.

There's still a long way to go to make Hildon's development truly
open, transparent and independent from Maemo and Nokia's
Internet Tablet. It's about more than just the code - planning,
releasing, decision making need to be further opened up as well.

There's a clear understanding at Nokia that this is the way to go.
The trend has been clear but Intel's and Ubuntu's interest on the
project add a sense of urgency.

At this point maemo's infrastructure is becoming inappropriate
to host the development of a project that needs to be spun off
from the specifics of the maemo environment and made accessible
to developers interested in deploying Hildon in other environments
such as Mobile Ubuntu.

Setting up independent Hildon infrastructure (mailing list, wiki,
svn, bugzilla,...) is clearly an option but there's a bolder possibility
to consider: relocating the Hildon project to GNOME infrastructure
moving Hildon closer to the project and community it is based on.

I believe GNOME is where Hildon ultimately belongs as a
GNOME Mobile framework optimized for the Tablet / MID form factors.

Hildon could not (yet?) be part of the GNOME release but I believe it
would fit well as a user of the GNOME infrastructure and could
well move closer. As an example, releasing Hildon on a public
schedule aligned with GNOME's is a very attractive proposition right now.

Getting there would require solving a lot of practical problems
mainly but not only at Nokia and would not happen overnight but
could be worth the effort. So hildon gnome org is a possibility
that we are very seriously considering now at Nokia.

With that in mind, I'd like to hear from the GNOME community,
particularly the GNOME Mobile people, about how realistic and
desirable you find this possibility.

Cheers,
Carlos

[1] https://stage.maemo.org/svn/maemo/projects/haf/