Re: Where can I download Gnome Mobile?

[Dave Neary <bolsh gnome org>]

Hi,

Lionel Dricot wrote:
> I think it's a very interesting question. It points out the fact that,
> while Gnome Mobile seems to be cool, nobody but gnome mobile developpers
> know exactly what it is.

GNOME Mobile is what its participants make it.

At its origin, we imagined that it would be a place where members of
industry teams building on common community-developed pieces of the
platform could meet with community developers, share resources,
experiences and (why not?) resources to improve that platform for their
needs.

This has happened, but in a somewhat haphazard manner. In particular, I
think that Nokia has collaborated well with the community through its
support of community conferences and meetings, having some prominent
members of the team who became public participants with GNOME projects,
and through funding community development through companies like Opened
Hand.

And now we are evolving. With the 2.24 release, we will have a GNOME
Mobile release set, which will include GNOME modules and related
external dependencies, which will provide third party developers with a
core set of APIs which they can be reasonably confident will be present
on a whole host of platforms, including moblin, Maemo, LiMo, Nokia's
internet tablets, Poky Linux, Ubuntu Mobile Edition and more. There are
a growing number of devices with these libraries on there.

So this platform (which you will be able to download and play with as
part of a larger distribution such as Poky Linux) is more & more compelling.

Yet what we have not yet seen from participants is a desire to use this
forum to identify (and collaborate on fixing) specific issues that you
have found with the platform. I'm thinking of things along the lines of
"The performance of (thing X) is a huge bottleneck for us" or "We really
need an improved input method for (hardware Y)" or  "It'd be great to
have better integration of (technology X) for this type of application".

When people start saying things like this, and getting some results from
that kind of collaboration, I think that you will see GNOME Mobile
become a lot more useful. But like everything else in the free software
world, it will be a bottom-up effort, not top-down.

> I believe that it should be more clear on the website what Gnome Mobile
> is and is not and the answer to those questions should be immediate :
> 
> 1) What benefits will I have if I use Gnome Mobile to build my device
> 2) What are the alternatives to Gnome Mobile (so I see better how it fit
> in the market)
> 3) How do I build a proptotype using Gnome Mobile with my hardware ?

Hopefully I've answered some of these...

Benefits: A platform shared by a wide range of devices, proven
technology for shipping production mass market devices.

Alternatives: For phones, I guess Android, Qtopia, Symbian fit in there.
All of them have licensing issues which the GNOME Mobile platform does
not. Of course, licensing changes all the time.

Prototype: Use something like Ubuntu Mobile Edition or Poky Linux. to
get your software up & running, emulating ARM. Use development tools
like Scratchbox to generate images. Build your hardware ;) Make software
work with hardware.

> I had myself some difficulties to answer those questions when I
> presented Gnome Mobile to my boss.

Hopefully you'll be able to explain it better now ;)

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
bolsh gnome org