On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 9:57 PM, Dirk Hohndel <[email protected]> wrote: > I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Open source projects have > maintainers and maintainers make decisions.
Certainly. But MeeGo is still going through a transition period, and as such the current maintainers and actions of the maintainers are much more Nokia/Intel-influenced than they may be in the future. > We are trying to open these > decisions to public discussions, but at the end of the day the > maintainers make the decisions. We can always have custom spins that do > things differently, but for the default builds, someone needs to make > the call - and that's what's happening. > > I think this will feel much more natural as we have more maintainers who > don't work at either Intel or Nokia Yes. Having maintainers who are not beholden to a Nokia or Intel paycheck will go a long way towards distinguishing the MeeGo project as a Community-run, merit-based endeavor. > That's where the "big reveal" for the first > version comes from - and especially around art work and look and feel > we'll see quite a bit of the more protective thinking of the companies > in the future (as we have seen in Maemo and Moblin in the past). Hopefully the amount of "protected," in-secret development will decrease over time. I mean, nobody's going to *encourage* more closed work on the core MeeGo stack, right? > But once the first relaese with the full UX is out I think this will > also turn into a much more natural way of working. Good. > Yes, I bet there will > continue to be "big reveals" around new iterations of the look and > feel. Now I'm getting a bit confused. How could there be future "big reveals" if project development is done in an open fashion? > But the project itself will run as a community project. That's our > goal and that's what we are measuring our success against. > Well that and the quality and success of the resulting OS. Maybe I'm just not understanding terminology, but I'm still confused about where Intel and Nokia are taking the MeeGo project. My impression has been that Intel and Nokia would be shepherding the MeeGo project in its initial stages. Once the project was been established and the "big reveals" of the first iteration of the look-and-feel were dropped into the project, the MeeGo core project would be developed as an FOSS project with open development. After the initial phase, vendors (including Nokia and Intel) could take the core MeeGo platform and then apply whatever additional layers they'd like on top of it. The vendors could switch out the UI, add a different app store, etc. If the vendors kept their platforms "close enough" to the core MeeGo OS, they'd be able to use the MeeGo name, if they so desired. Now to pick a hypothetical situation, let's say that Intel were to work in secret and to develop a new UI for MeeGo. My assumption was that Intel *could* work in secret, however there would be no guarantee that the community around the MeeGo project would accept Intel's new design. Intel would be completely free to put the new UI *on their own devices*, but not directly into the MeeGo core. Based on what Dirk just said about "big reveals," it sounds like my assumption may be incorrect. I think we've all accepted the fact that during initial development Intel and Nokia will develop components privately and then drop them into MeeGo core without external review. But to make "big reveals" possible, it seems to me that Nokia and Intel will have to retain this right, potentially indefinitely. And I'm not sure how that kind of power can be compatible with a FOSS project with open development. > >> MeeGo is a >> 'curated computing environment' where the file system is the best of >> breed but the only one and MeeGo will not listen to the debate. > > Here I disagree. MeeGo as an open source project will of course listen > to the debate. On the filesystem simply nothing new came to light and > the maintainer decided to stay the course. On other topics I expect this > will be different - as you guys certainly have a ton of expertize that > will help us create a better OS. If we weren't plannign to listen then > why bother with an open source OS? I think the biggest issue is that people still see the phrase "MeeGo listening to the community" and read that (perhaps correctly) as "Nokia+Intel listening to the community". > I'll tell you honestly that my (and our) goals are much much higher than > that. The "appearance of meritocratic openness" is not what we are > aiming for. We are aiming for the best client OS out there. And the only > way to get there is to harness what companies are good at doing (e.g., a > consistent well designed look and feel) and what the community is good > at doing (finding the best solutions to a ton of technical problems, > dealing with the endless combinations of hardware and the weird bugs > that are triggered by that, innovating on top of what exists today, > finding interesting new use cases and basically making the OS better). It sounds like you're arguing that the "best client OS out there" will harness the community to do a lot of hardware compatibility, grunt work, etc..., and the companies (intel + nokia) will add the shiny UI on top. I don't have a lot of experience designing UIs, but what if some other members of the community want to work on the UI? Will they find themselves excluded if Nokia and Intel are cooking up something new that hasn't been released to the public yet? > Yes, the maintainers will continue to have some control - that's > necessary to create a resulting OS that actually works. And I think the > sooner we have community maintainers the better. Until then, speak up, > argue with us, help us to live up to these expectations. Will do. >> ...[MeeGo] is a commercial Linux distro, not an open source project. > > It's trying to be both. It's trying to be a great platform to > target. But it will do so by working in the open, with the community. Keep MeeGo development open, and you'll have a lot of supporters and developers "basically making the OS better." -- Robinson _______________________________________________ MeeGo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev
