Community Matters

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.

Thanks for visiting!
I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?

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.