Re: Hildon on MeeGo

[Nils Faerber <nils faerber kernelconcepts de>]

Dr. Michael Lauer wrote:
> Am 16.06.2010 um 11:34 schrieb Nils Faerber:
>> The very same reason for FSO loosing attraction also applies to GPE - no
>> hackable devices. All half way accessible devices come with binary only
>> parts that make it extremely hard to put anything but the original
>> system on them (like N900, PalmPre, most/all Android devices, etc.).
> 
> Indeed. That's why I think the money would be more wisely spent by
> supporting some of these activities rather than porting a deprecated
> UI to work with another library.

The latter definitely.

But I am not sure that porting efforts to existing commercial devices
will help much. The biggest issue is that once you are halfway working
the device is out of production and you have to start from scratch with
the next device. A battle you will never win.

For embedded/mobile open source I think we have to find our own niche
which is not yet dominated by big players and where open source really
has major advantages. This may mean that mainstream consumer devices
like mobile phones should not be the major target - they are very
tempting but out of our reach.

Maybe the embedded and strongly customized devices are more interesting
for us now - like home automation, "tablets" (device class like iPad),
etc. Here we will soon find more and more devices which could be a)
accessible to hackers and b) where there are many more manufacturers
that want differentiation which means, they do not want the same as the
competitor.
This could be the Gnome/mobile chance to win plus-points by providing a
well equipped toolbox while leaving a lot of space for manufacturers to
individualise their implementation of their device (which would be hard
with e.g. Android). But the toolbox needs to be easy to use.
So documentation and creating SDK toolboxes would be a very good goal.
Look at it from the device maker side - Ideally you just want to
configure your target image/device and not start a week long compile
session.

> But as Quim very early stated, that's out of the question.
> 
> :M:
Cheers
  nils

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