Community Matters

More than a thousand people attended the MeeGo Conference 2010. Hundreds more watched the live streams of keynotes and track 1. The energy in the hall ways was impressive.

Since I organized the event, I was hesitant to write much about it here, but then I figured “why not”.

It was an amazing show of excitement and interest by a surprisingly large crowd of mostly developers that came to Dublin to talk for a few days about the future of their OS. As an organizer, the event exceeded all of my expectations. More attendees from more countries and more companies than I thought we’d get in my wildest dreams. 70 sessions in the reviewed traditional conference. Another 30 or so during the unconference on day 3. Great tutorials and workshop, organized by the community (thanks Dave Neary for all your help). A fun run with about 35 attendees out at 6:45 in the morning for about 5.5km through Dublin. It all came together very well.

What were the highlights for me?

• Attendance, energy and “feel” of the event.
• The number of top developers / maintainers who attended and gave talks on their subject matters. Gnome people, KDE people, kernel people, tool people, community people, commercial people. MeeGo people.
• The Guinness party and the Ireland-Norway match. That will be hard to top.
• I really wanted to call out one talk or session that I liked best – but I can’t. Too many great ones to chose from.

Was everything perfect? No. We had issues with the registration system (a bunch of registrations apparently got lost somewhere – but we made things up on site). The give-away didn’t go as planned because a storm the week before the conference delayed the arrival of the Lenovo S10 that we were planning to hand out. There were a bunch of other hickups here and there that we hope we hid well from the attendees. But given that this was the first external conference that we had organized and given that the event ended up hosting about twice as many people as we had planned, I think things went very well.

Thanks to everyone who attended – I can’t wait to do this again next May.

Today I had the pleasure of presenting about MeeGo in the mobile Linux track at LinuxTag 2010. The room was packed, thankfully I had a double slot so I had plenty of time to talk about the what and the why and the how of MeeGo. I talked about the origins of MeeGo and explained the governance model. I walked through the architecture and then spent a lot of time explaining how we focus on working with the upstream projects. Finally I dared to do an unscripted demo of MeeGo on a Netbook (for stupid reasons I had to show it on a somewhat bigger system, a ThinkPad X200s). I was able to show myZone, some of the apps (email, media), social media interactions and the breadth of additional software that is available.

Things went fairly well, if I can believe the comments on Twitter and what people told me afterwards in person.

The presentation is on the MeeGo presentation site

One of the hardest things for people to understand about MeeGo is the intersection between what wants to be a community distribution and what appears to be a distribution with a strong influence by its two major sponsors (Intel and Nokia).

In a community distribution the maintainers make the decisions. Today, in MeeGo those maintainers are employed by the corporate sponsors. So this causes confusion about who runs the project. No, it’s not the corporations. It’s the maintainers.

What can we do to fix that? Get maintainers that don’t work for Intel or Nokia. So as far as I’m concerned, this is our biggest challenge right now. Once we have a diverse set of maintainers the actions by the major corporations involved will no longer appear as the corporate overlords imposing their will, it will be significant contributions by major contributors. And that’s a much healthier view of things.

Look at that – there’s a new project out there, doing client Linux for devices, mobile and otherwise. With a focus on phones and netbooks and cool things like connected TVs and in vehicle infotainment (i.e., nav systems that can also play DVDs and surf the web – preferably not by the driver, while driving… but I digress).

So MeeGo has just been launched, the website is still under development and has quite a few spots that are waiting for content, but what is clear is where the project comes from and where it is going.

maemo and Moblin have been around for a while. They are both shipping on products; maemo on phones like the Nokia N900, Moblin on a bunch of Netbooks from Dell, Samsung, MSI and others – delivered through OSVs like Novell or Canonical. They both have track record as solid and competent and innovative. And they are actually quite similar in many of the underlying ideas. Which is a good sign, if you think about it.

But why merge them? Aren’t major mergers always a bad thing (cue the music from the Daimler / Chrysler horror movie). Well it’s not the corporations that are merging. It’s the open source projects that are combining forces. And that’s a good thing. There are too many projects doing the same thing over and over again. Having two of them that are well aligned get together and take the best from both sides to create something that’s even better is promising.

What will this mean in detail? Well, there’s a lot more that will have to be published by the Moblin and maemo leadership teams, but it seems that we will see a base OS that is largely built around the Moblin infrastructure, including fast and flicker free boot, non-root X, connman, etc. And the Qt-based application development environment that maemo has been migrating to. Add to that the experience in building operating systems for phones and netbooks and many other new devices and you have an interesting mix.

The first actual release won’t happen until the second quarter, it seems. But I guess we need to give the teams some time to actually get the details figured out. I’m excited.

My usual disclosure: I work for Intel, so some might conclude that I’m biased. But this is my blog, not an Intel blog. So what you read here are my thoughts, not those of my employer.