Moblin at OSCON
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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.
Hi!
Unfortunately I could not attend OSCON so like many others I read about the sudden move to Fedora from The Register. The article is of course very low on details. This move was not discussed in moblin-dev either. Can you clarify the motivation, impacts on this change (for developers and ISVs) and how you see the future position of UME in the field of MIDs and other Atom based devices.
The article in the register is not only low on detail, it’s also high in content that’s made up or blown out of proportion.
But to your question. Moblin 1 (which is mostly being discussed on moblin-dev at this point) will of course stay a .deb based distribution. So there’s no change there and no impact on Ubuntu Mobile Edition, which is based on Moblin 1.
With Moblin 2 (which we have talked about in the playground, but not put out to our community, yet – which is why there’s no discussion on this on moblin-dev) we decided to move to an rpm based distribution as that gave us better build tools and most importantly a better way to manage the licenses under which the individual packages are released.
This had been discussed with Ubuntu and as far as I know they will pull from our repositories and continue to create a Mobile Edition. That’s the beauty of open source.
Thanks for clarification.
It was so confusing.