Community Matters

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.

Yesterday at IDF Dell announced the first Netbook with Moblin preloaded. And I hear rumors of another one being announced shorty from a different OEM, that one based on Novell’s Moblin build.

Two years ago Asus created the Netbook segment with Linux – the Xandros based EeePC 701. A somewhat limited device with a 7 inch screen, a puny little keyboard and a not very well adapted Linux build. It turned out that the customers didn’t like the Linux experience that was offered (at least that’s part of the story). And so right now the vast majority of Netbooks ships with 8 year old Windows XP Home. But this might change now. Assuming, that is, that there’s sufficient demand for a Linux preload that is actually designed for Netbooks and works well out of the box. And has a refreshingly different, well tuned user experience that actually makes sense for computers in the Netbook form factor.

So in a way we are at an inflection point. The Linux community keeps asking OEMs to be more open to preloading Linux. Yet the OEMs tend to be unhappy with the sell through of their Linux preloaded machines. The solution is simple. If you like the idea of Moblin on Netbooks, if you want a really affordable Netbook without a Redmond tax – go to Dell’s site and get a Dell Mini 10v with Moblin for $299 (and sorry, I haven’t figured out yet how this works from outside the US – comments with data points are very welcome).

And yes, I already ordered mine. Even though Dell only offers the Broadcom wireless cards with it – a true disappointment given Broadcom’s lack of Linux support. I wish they offered Intel wireless – I’d happily pay a few $$ extra for that…

The moment I see other Moblin based Netbooks, I’ll post here with links how to get them. I hope we can change the available options for Netbook buyers for good.

The clash of the titans. War! Fight! It’s fun to read what has been written about the GoogleOS. Clearly this is getting the juices flowing. Nothing sells newspaper (or online ads, I guess) like a good old conflict. And who better to pit against each other than the Evil Monster Microsoft (seriously?) against the “do no evil” Google.

But of course that’s missing the point. Google isn’t writing a new OS. They didn’t do that with Android, either. They are using the existing Linux kernel. They are using tons of existing user space code that the open source community has worked on for 20+ years and that the Linux vendors have perfected over the last 15 years (and that Ubuntu has taken a free ride on for… wait, I digress).

So what Google really is doing is that it is putting its well proven brand and marketing muscle behind something that mostly exists. And then it’s using its not-quite-so-proven productization muscle (hey, Gmail is no longer in beta after umpteen years) to shape the very flexible Linux OS to its liking.

More focus on web. Less focus on native apps. More focus on binding the user to a monopoly (sounds familiar?), less focus on freedom and choice. We’ve seen this play out. Many times.

What is interesting is that with Moblin (and all the Linux OSVs who have announced Moblin compliant versions of their Linux OS) there is a pretty interesting contender just about to go product – about a year ahead of Google’s Chrome OS. So is Google actually hurting Linux here with its “quick – don’t look – we’ll do something even better!” announcement? I wonder. The timing is sure odd. Long before they have anything to show for, just making sure that no other standard emerges?

Well, time will tell. Moblin needs to succeed on its own merit – and it has plenty of time to do so. And a year from now we’ll know more about Google’s ability to create a production quality OS for a broad set of hardware platforms. In the mean time I’m excited about all the opportunities.

Oh, you may have noticed that I didn’t talk about Microsoft Windows 7 and Apple OS X in this post. That’s right – those target different markets (I know, MS dreams of Windows 7 for Netbooks – but at a 20% price premium compared to a free OS… that will be a tough sell). I don’t think that Google Chrome OS (or Moblin, for that matter) will have a chance against W7 and OSX on full fledged notebooks, desktops and workstations. And I don’t think that either is trying to do that. On the other hand I think that there’s plenty of space for a free OS on limited capability. And that’s where Google’s Chrome OS is indeed competing with Moblin, Google’s Android and other Linux based offerings.

The alphas showed some of the work done on the underlying technologies – things around fast boot, battery optimizations, etc.

The beta for the first time shows the new user experience. This is not just another client OS – and definitely not a Windows 95 lookalike (which way too many Linux client OSs still are).

Check it out on the Moblin site.

Disclaimer on top (so no one can claim they didn’t see it): I’m obviously not necessarily an objective observer here. I work for Intel and have been involved with the Linux Foundation and its predecessor organizations for many many years. But this is my blog – unrelated to either organization (so if you quote me, please keep that in mind).

Some people might think the blog post at the New York Times that Intel hands Moblin over to the Linux Foundation is an April Fools joke. But even though the headline is a little unfortunate, the content of the article is correct: In order to make it easier for more people to get involved in Moblin, Intel has asked the Linux Foundation to take over the stewardship of the project.

This does not indicate any reduction in Intel’s effort on Moblin (quite the contrary, actually). Nor does it mean that dramatic changes are coming to the short term development plans. On the technical side it’s the same engineers doing the same impressive work.

But neither is this just a symbolic act – this really means that the Linux Foundation – a “nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux” (quoted from their About page) is hosting the project and will run it in a way similar to many other open source projects. The role of contributors will be determined by their merit to the project; which means that non-Intel engineers will hopefully soon step up into leadership roles. This is important for the pace of adoption of Moblin in the industry and (based on my conviction that true open source development is a huge advantage) this will cause the pace of innovation to increase even more. And it is something that would have been much harder to implement if the project is seen as only “Intel’s Linux OS”.

So to me this is great news. And from what I am hearing the same is true for many in the Linux community who have watched the first signs of life of Moblin with growing excitement. With the release of Alpha 2 a short while ago the traffic on our developer list has noticeably picked up – as has coverage in the press. And frankly, Alpha 2 barely scratches the surface of what Moblin will deliver.

Next week at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit I will host a Moblin track and I am very much looking forward to discussing what all this means with the attendees.

The Moblin development team has been working very hard over the last few months and finally released the first public alpha of Moblin 2. You can get images (very useful hybrid ones that boot from both CD and USB stick as well as KVM or VMware images) at the Moblin website. If you want to play with the Moblin 2 image on your netbook, please be aware that these images are optimized for Atom processor based systems (as they heavily rely on SSE3 for performance reasons – so technically they’d run on Core 2 Duo processor based systems as well, I guess).

We’ve tested them on the Acer Aspire One, the EeePC 901 and 1000 and the Dell Mini 9. They should run on most of the other Atom processor based Netbooks and we’d be very interested to hear about success (or problem) reports from those.

Linux Kongress is the oldest Linux event. How do I know? Well, in 1994, Linux Kongress in Heidelberg was the first ever conference on Linux. It was a really cool event that brought most of the key Linux developers of the time together – many of us met there in person for the first time! And since then, every year there has been a Linux Kongress (okay, that’s mildly cheating, last year’s event was only held “in spirit” as part of linux.conf.eu when the Kernel Summit came to Cambridge and the Linux Kongress organizers didn’t want to try to create an event competing wiht that).

So yesterday I had the honor to be the closing presenter at the 2008 edition of Linux Kongress, after having to miss attending a few of the last years. It was great to see so many familiar faces and my only regret was that based on some personal travel that I did earlier in the week I had to miss the first day of the event. Still, I had a great time and enjoyed the opportunity to talk about “Mobile Linux” and what I think it will take for the community to create a really compelling OS for the mobile internet user. I tried to explain where Linux falls short at present and what we are doing with the Moblin community to create the technologies to help to close that gap. Of course I took a chance to show off the amazing five second boot of an EeePC. But see for yourself. The talk should be up in the archive of Linux Pro Magazin’s Online Conference Streaming, soon.

Some good news became public yesterday: Intel acquired OpenedHand, bringing some top talent into the Open Source Technology Center who will focus on Moblin in the future.

I gave a keynote at OSCON yesterday. Always fun – especially if you have about 48 hours of warning that you’ll be the speaker… Imad, my boss, was called out of town on short notice and asked me to take over from him. Which I did quite happily as I love giving presentations (weird, I know).

The topic was Moblin – or more specifically, the Moblin.org open source project and our goal to get a larger and larger open source developer community together that will drive the direction of the open source software stack used on internet focused devices. Lots of “open source” in that last sentence. And that’s intentional. There are many projects that try to create open source or Linux based stacks for mobile devices. But none of them have really convinced me that they are truly open source. Openmoko may be an exception – but as I wrote a couple of months ago progress there has been slow.

So why is this focus on open source important? Because only if we allow the community to take the stack and push it in any direction they want to go, contribute back, take the ideas and start new projects and overall make this project theirs, only then will the type of innovation happen on Moblin that I think will be the key to the success of mobile Linux devices. And while I love my Mac and I know that my wife likes her iPhone, I’d much rather see a free and open stack be successful and competitive and ensure that innovation will continue.

So go take a look at Moblin.org and especially at the playground.

Moblin launched almost a year ago. It’s “an open source community for sharing software technologies, ideas, projects, code, and applications to create an untethered computing experience across Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), Netbooks, and embedded devices.”

So what?

Well, the much talked about Ubuntu Netbook Remix is based on Moblin. So are a number of products that will be announced in the next few months. But more importantly, Moblin is the place where a lot of developers are looking at ways to create a better experience for users of Linux devices – potentially as small as a phone or as flexible as a Netbook. And in the never-ending discussion of “does Linux matter on the desktop?” this may be the answer: Does the desktop still matter? Or will it be replaced by a different type of devices that follow different rules and create a more level playing field for a wider variety of software offerings?

In a way, the iPhone is one entry in this category. The EeePC and it’s competitors certainly are as well. This category is growing incredibly fast and Linux (or should I say, non-Windows OSs) are extremely successful in this field.

The Moblin team is busily working on its next-generation ideas. Actually, this week about a dozen people were locked away from phones and email in a week-long sprint in order to be able to focus on Moblin2 and in order to be able to get some significant progress towards our plans for the design of and infrastructure around the next generation of Moblin. What I heard and saw is promising. Stay tuned.