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Comparing the Freedoms Offered By Maemo and Android
An anonymous reader writes "Maemo 5 and Android have received a lot of publicity lately, despite the former not even shipping yet. Both have become famous partly for using the Linux kernel, but now that we have a choice, how do we pick one? Is the issue as mundane as choosing your favorite desktop distribution, or is there a more significant difference? This article compares the two from an end user and developer perspective, emphasizing root access and ease of sharing code."
There's a number of options out there. I'm going to speak as a developer for this reply.
Nobody and I mean nobody that allows development on their device is really and truly operating as an open source project. Them's the facts of the matter. There is definitely a sliding scale of open here with lots of gray areas here and there. Take the iPhone, at least as a dev you get access to early release software prior to release. For android can you go and find the 2.0 SDK anywhere? Nope. So much for Verizon's claims about 'droid being 'open'.
Be it Android, PalmOS, iPhone, Maemo, Moblin, whatever do any of these projects have open mailing lists setting directions of the project? Nope. Everyone of them get's an EPIC FAIL in my book for openness. Granted all of them at least allow you to develop apps. If you're someone making a living making apps, then that's going to be 'good enough'. As a developer you just nee to pick the ecosystem that makes the most sense to you.
However if you're a traditional open source developer looking to participate, the bad news is, "sorry" ... no one is really catering to that in my opinion. But is that kind of "cold" treatment really something that has ever stopped open source developers? Let's not forget that a Maemo, Android, Moblin, Palm's WebOS all include open source packages at least does mean that they have to continue to get their code from the community. Granted they can effectively fork and port their patches forward time and again, but you'd hope over time they'll learn... get involved with the community, work with the community .. be open... time will tell. Least across the board things have come a long way and we're not saddled with a 90% windows (mobile) market share. Competition between OSes for cell phones sure makes for exciting times.