Intel Drops MeeGo

PolygamousRanchKid writes with an article in CNet about yet more dismal news for MeeGo. Quoting the article: "Like the Moblin operating system before it, Linux-based MeeGo will will be merged out of existence. MeeGo will become Tizen, Intel said today. 'Intel joined Linux Foundation and LiMo Foundation in support of Tizen, a new Linux-based open source software platform for multiple device categories,' the company said in a statement. 'Tizen builds upon the strengths of both LiMo and MeeGo and Intel will be working with our MeeGo partners to help them transition to Tizen,' Intel said. The initial release of Tizen is expected in Q1 2012, enabling the first devices in the market mid-2012..." PolygamousRanchKid adds "It seems one of those strengths is not actually making it into a product on the market yet." This on the heels of Nokia shipping the N9 (which is actually running a weird Maemo/Meego hybrid).

Comments

Misleading title

[Kristian T.]

This sounds like a great thing, not at all like the title implies. Pooling the rescources into a project that has a greater chance of success, should prove a good thing for everyone who cares about MeeGo. There's enough of a lead for the competetion as it is, even without dividing the OS community into different factions.

Re:Misleading title

[hairyfeet]

I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out, but maybe all these projects are dying because they are pointless? Apple rules the tablet, MSFT the desktop, and the phone is split between Apple and Google. So where is the market they were going to capture? Geeks that actually even know what 'free as in freedom' means much less cares about it are probably in the 0.03% range, so no real growth there. Hell the rest of the planet happily sends their data freely to Google and their money to Apple and MSFT so i can't suddenly see them going "Hey wait a tick!" and demanding the four freedoms.

So there just wasn't any real place for them to go is all. even the laptop and netbook OEMs where profits are razor thin don't really need it as MSFT sells dirt cheap Win 7 licenses to that segment and for instant on they have Splashtop AKA ExpressGate. So in an already overcrowded arena Intel looked at the writing on the wall and saw they were just wasting good money on a dead end. it certainly wasn't gonna sell more Intel CPU or "challenge the Wintel monopoly" as so many articles hinted when it first was being discussed.

Re:Misleading title

[inglorion_on_the_net]

I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out, but maybe all these projects are dying because they are pointless? Apple rules the tablet, MSFT the desktop, and the phone is split between Apple and Google. So where is the market they were going to capture?

Of course, if everybody thought like that, Apple would never have gone on to rule the tablet, nor MSFT the desktop, and neither Apple nor Google would be in the phone market. All of these segments were dominated by other vendors before.

So, far from being pointless, projects like Maemo are very interesting, because they have the potential to bring something new (and, in this case, more standard and open) to the scene. That's why it is so sad they have been going nowhere, and that is why we have this story on Slashdot. If it wasn't for that, Meego would just be another unpopular project that nobody cared about. It is interesting because, at least in theory, it could break the grasp of the major vendors.

Re:Misleading title

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

It isn't a good thing. I don't know what moblin was like, but Mameo was pretty much a fully complete, working operating system that shipped on actual devices the merger with Moblin set them back a couple years. Nokia would have been better off to decline the invitation to merge with Moblin.

Re:Misleading title

[yacc143]

Well, and the difference is that producing hardware is not exactly cheap. So we've got the N900 running Maemo5 which is rather strongly different from earlier releases on the N8xx devices. Then we were told, after the N900 was received nicely (as a mobile, not a tablet), from Nokia that they'll merge Maemo into Meego.
At the same time, the whole distribution was changing over from Gtk to Qt, because Nokia wanted one toolkit that works on all it's platforms. Than Nokia decided to get paid for committing suicide (well, the "new" Nokia will almost certainly loose market share even faster in it's strong points, while it's completely unclear how well Windows Phone will work out. Especially as many long time of older MS mobile offerings do not associate good things with the name), and as we were told, the Intel guys responsible for MeeGo, read about this in their newspapers. Now Intel does a similar move, it drops MeeGo and merges it yet again.

There are also some interesting data points:

- the N900 was a fully end user (non-hacker) compatible phone, better than all other offerings (Symbian^3) from Nokia.
- the N900 turned into this cool ARM based Linux supermini laptop only when one enabled the devel repositories.
- Maemo, having existed for some time (the version number is 5), does have a functional open source community.
- The community crowd is already much smaller with MeeGo, and we'll see how many Tizen guys will be left over.
- Changing the rules of the game has a tradition for Nokia (basically compatibility between different releases of Symbian have been at best source-level), but the game overall has changed, Nokia is not top of the field anymore, so developers won't take abuse as easily as they have in the past. So Nokia sold their developer community on Qt, and a multiplatform strategy (which is as such not a bad thing, considering all the nice things Nokia has done in the past). Then, overnight, "Windows Phone is our future. No Qt on Windows Phone, sorry, our "partner" MS takes our and through us your concerns seriously. Btw, just keep developing Qt, will be still supported on Symbian, at least till we stop the production of that junk" => guess that makes for good relations with developers.

Imaginary scenario

[Rik Sweeney]

Board members: MeeGo, we need to talk
MeeGo: MeeGo is listening?
Board members: It's not working out, we're going to have to let you go
MeeGo: We go?
Board members: No, just you
MeeGo: Me go?
Board members: Yes, MeeGo, you go
MeeGo: MeeGo go?
Board members: (sigh) Just get out

Mego is dead, Webos is dead ...

[Chrisq]

Meego is dead, Webos is dead ...and I don't feel very well.

Re:Mego is dead, Webos is dead ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, there's just no room in this world for a small, scrappy underdog like Intel.....

Re:Mego is dead, Webos is dead ...

[21mhz]

Meanwhile the rest of the world uses something else on actual, shipped devices.

Re:Mego is dead, Webos is dead ...

[jx100]

Like the awesome Maemo I have on my n900?

Re:Mego is dead, Webos is dead ...

[21mhz]

Like the awesome Maemo I have on my n900?

That was abandoned for a new platform, which has just been abandoned for a new platform.

good and bad

[drinkypoo]

Bad news, intel drops it.

Good news, Linux Foundation is in charge. Some of you may not have followed along since the beginning, but Moblin begat Meego, and what was Moblin? Intel put a Clutter-based UI on Linux after stripping its ability to run on anything not based on a recent Intel CPU. Whoop. De. Doo. None of what Intel did to Linux with Moblin has any repercussions for anyone not using an x86-compatible Intel processor. While that does still seem to cover the majority of the market, it's still not an interesting basis for a Linux distribution; rather, it is a collection of features which by now have made it into the mainline.

So the bad news is that Intel has given up on the notion that x86 is ready for phones, but that's good news too. And meanwhile, Intel can go back to doing what they do best, trying to trip AMD up so that they don't have to compete on a level playing field. Since anyone can contribute to Linux, they were never going to differentiate themselves from AMD there.

Re:good and bad

[fatphil]

From my perspective in north-eastern Europe, I think the situation's better described as an MS trojan horse stabbing Nokia in the face such that they fell over and headbutted Intel.

But the Nokia/Intel thing was never going to last anyway. That was Nokia giving their new boyfriend, Intel, a blowjob, and sending the camphone photos to their ex, TI.

Re:good and bad

[Tapewolf]

How the hell have the relevant companies managed to screw up producing a Linux-based mobile phone OS/interface so badly?

Easy. Every time they got it working, they started again from scratch.

Re:Android is next...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Oh man... Android is FAR from unprofitable for Google. Sure, the OS itself doesn't generate any revenue, but it's a platform Google has control over (that alone is invaluable) and with which they can push their shit your way (more $ there).

Android is the proverbial cheap razor that allows Google to sell blades.

Interesting move.

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I can't help but notice that Samsung is a partner. Could this be the OS we kept hearing rumors about? You know the one where Samsung is nervous about Google's purchase of Motorola and needs to hedge its bets by having their own OS.

I would love to see Meego/Tizen continue to exist. I'm glad Samsung is stepping up to replace Nokia that went to Microsoft.

Intel renames AppUp Store!

[Anonymous Coward]

New name is TitzUp!

.deb and Qt, please

[Alex Belits]

Now if only they will bring back Maemo's Debian-based package management and properly maintained Qt support to their native applications, and it will be back to the direction where Maemo was supposed to be heading before Nokia fucked up.

Making it possible to merge at least some things that are now maintained in Maemo Community SSU (last updated September 7 2011 if anyone did not notice), would be nice, too, however there certainly will be incompatibility with that.

No repercussions?

[Sits]

I'm not quite sure what you mean when you say "None of what Intel did to Linux with Moblin has any repercussions for anyone not using an x86-compatible Intel processor." For now I will interpret that as "they did nothing of interest for machines with CPUs from AMD/ARM etc.

Arjan van de van's work on asynchronous initialization of kernel subsystems means you will spend less time waiting for the kernel to finishon all sorts of CPUs - not just x86s. Powertop works on CPUs other than Intel's and has been used to help monitor power consumption of various program running on Linux.

Surely the fact that much of this work has gone upstream/mainline is a positive thing rather than a negative one? It's hard to tell which way you view this from your comment...

Re:No repercussions?

[drinkypoo]

None of that was related to moblin except retroactively. The improved boot time was demonstrated with both moblin and fedora and powertop was its own thing.

Re:Android is next...

[pscottdv]

Every time you touch that search button on your Android phone it makes Google very happy. Sun had no similar way to derive value directly from Java

Re:Android-alike

[berashith]

I really wanted the n900, and would have bought one except that I had purchased the n770 several years earlier. The n770 was a great little tablet, very cool, out to market way ahead of the iPhone with all of the features except the phone. When Nokia upgraded to the n800, the n770 lost all support from maemo. The new OS couldnt back port, all apps were being supported on the new OS, so my cool little device just sat there with no community and no support. I was very wary of the n900 for this, and waited to see what would happen. When I was about to buy one, the MeeGo announcement came through, and it was obvious that history was going to repeat. Nokia had no clue how to handle this, and the legacy is being handed down throughout all of the descendants.

Re:MeeGo Drop MeeGo

[bill_mcgonigle]

Why would any developers want to write in HTML5?

It's easier. Easier = more apps = more revenue for whoever's running the app store.

It seems unlikely that they'll write their own rendering engine or switch the whole project over to GTK, so probably this will be running WebKit on Qt. Perhaps even on XCB if they're feeling ambitious - Qt on X11 suffers from layering performance problems (one of the Qt devs has a good blog post on all the inefficiencies from the driver layer on up).

Re:Android-alike

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

"a linux backend with an interpreted front-end. It mentions HTML5 as the primary API"

I haven't looked at the announcement itself yet, but that right there makes it sound like WebOS, or "PhoneGap, The Operating System"...and I'm okay with that.

If they can manage to get devices out and price them substantially lower than the premium iPod Mega (or 'iPad' if you prefer) or Xoom sorts of gadgets I'd love to have something like that.

Nokia = Amiga for a new generation

[forgot_my_username]

I don't know what the deal is..
I had an Amiga 1000... loved it (superior in sooooo many ways) ! Then Commodore blew it.
Then I had the Nokia 770... loved it! But, Nokia never really did anything with it
Then I got the Nokia N800 ... loved it! But, Nokia blew it.
Then I saw the N9... I want it... then Nokia Blows it before even releasing it
WTF?!?!?


hmmmm... I bet the problem is me...

I formally apologize for liking Nokia.
Now...maybe they can get their head out of their butts.

Re:Qt-based development

[Nyrath the nearly wi]

From MeeGo merges with LiMo to form Tizen

What role for Qt?

The future of Qt in relation to Tizen is uncertain. It was not mentioned in any of today’s press releases. The Tizen website does make reference to a native development, but does not provide any further details. Instead HTML 5 is promoted as the development environment of choice and in an elastic piece of thinking is given as the reason for the need to evolve MeeGo.

However, Qt is a key component in many MeeGo related projects (e.g. part of the reference design for the GENIVI alliance for IVI devices) and, as noted above, Intel have indicated that there will be backwards compatibility with existing MeeGo netbook applications.

It seems likely that politics has a role to play here. Qt came into the MeeGo project from Nokia. Despite recent moves towards open governance, is still very much associated with Nokia. Intel were unhappy that Nokia switched to Windows Phone and the member of LiMo (including Samsung) may prefer to avoid mentioning or relying on what is perceived to be a competitor's asset.

In our opinion the likely scenario is that Qt will continue to play a major role in Tizen projects, but it will not be promoted as part of the core primary developer environment. Qt may be included as part of the default offering or it may be left to integrators to provide a version of Tizen with Qt. A possible example of how this might work in practise comes from Nomovok, who today released a press statement indicating that they would provide a version of Tizen integrated with Qt as part of their Steelrat system.