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Ex-Nokia Staff To Build MeeGo-based Smartphones
Snirt writes "A group of ex-Nokia staff and MeeGo enthusiasts has formed Jolla (Finnish for 'dinghy'), a mobile startup with the aim of bringing new MeeGo devices to the market. According to its LinkedIn page, Jolla consists of directors and core professionals from Nokia's MeeGo N9 organization, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities."
I think it's too late due to the developer network effect (same goes for Firefox OS and even Windows Phone). But I'd like to be wrong about that.
... they would rather see you translate Jolla as "Lifeboat," rather than "Dinghy."
No worries, I doubt there will be a product named MeeGo. In fact, it isn't even using MeeGo, but Mer, which spun off from MeeGo when it became obvious that Nokia was going to walk away and Intel was off to pursue other things.
Jolla will probably name it something else exclusive to them. All that matters is by going with Mer (or as they've been saying, MeeGo) you know one thing: Qt.
Yugo, MeeGo, WeAllGo
Over in Redmond, Washington, millions of chairs cried out in terror as a sweaty monkey realised that all that money he's spend was in vain.
If they start selling some phones, who else better than Nokia to buy the company?
The company started as a pulp mill in 1865 in the city of Nokia, whose name might be from the word for sable, marten or beaver.
12 months?
Work bio at MMWD
By the time they get their MeeGo phones to market? Probably as soon as the first phone sells.
Please please please please buy the IP on the n900 hardware...don't let such a good design vanish....
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
They are actually already based on Mer: :)
https://twitter.com/JollaMobile/status/221688205672595456
I guess they are just using the MeeGo name for publicity.
The implication in the name of the creature seems to be that it had a soot-coloured (i.e. black) fur. The word "noki" means smut or soot.
The town's emblem is this black creature:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nokia.vaakuna.svg
If you're a Finn, or in Finland, then you might be interested in an exhibition in Vapriikki museum in Tampere which documents the history of Nokia very thoroughly. It's either just started, or will start soon. (Disclosure - I am not connected to it apart from the fact that they are regular indirect clients of my company.)
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
There's only a few actual connections.
Intel: Moblin -> MeeGo -> (huge disconnect, much package shedding) -> Mer
Nokia: Maemo -> Harmattan
Samsung: Tizen
...my unreplaceable one-of-a-kind Nokia N900 becomes irreparable, to come up with a phone worthy as its successor. It seems pretty solid, so I'll give you a few years. (fingers crossed)
The mobile market definitely needs a full gnu/linux phone. In fact, the N900 follows on from a privileged few mobile devices with desktop-like capability - the psion 3a, psion 5mx, Nokia 9500 communicator, Nokia E90 (only just). And it was only really the Psions that didn't shy from giving you the full OS experience just because it was a mobile device. Why can't my mobile device have a full fledged file-manager with drag-and-drop capability or a desktop where I can place regularly used files as well as applications?
But maybe I'm mad - apparently you don't need these things on the desktop either.
Those great people believe in bright future for MeeGo based phones. Microsoft also believed in bright future of MeeGo, so they spent billions of dollars to kill it. Windows phones are disaster: non-existant or buggy software (I can not download more than a dosen books on my new Windows phone - if I do that I have to reinstall Kindle App to get access to my books).
There's a fine line between "Flamebait" and "saying what a lot of people think, and delivering it very bluntly". "Me go plop plop" is in fact a very common phrase on the alt.tasteless newsgroup, for example. I'd have modded it insightful rather than flamebait!
Probably more of the blame for that should go on Intel than Nokia. I always felt (I was a Nokia dev.) that Intel was the dominant part of the "partnership". (And that the "partnership" was about as fake as Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes'.)
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Hey, if a few former Fairchild Semiconductor employees can form Intel and go on to take over the world, I don't see any reason to doubt a bunch of former Nokia employees could have a big impact on the cell phone market. Of course the odds of any startup just avoiding liquidation are very slim, so I don't recomend sinking money into them, but this is a very fast moving, immature market, so there's huge potental there.
it's like the third offshoot from Nokia, that's aiming to make phones.
Benefon actually made a lot of phones too(they were the first with tetris on a phone, first with t9, had dual sim phone ages ago and so forth), but their heyday went a decade ago.
the question for this new venture is if they can scoop up enough money to actually produce the hw properly. there has been literally dozens of OS only producing companies which amounted to pretty much nothing.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Writing apps in C and GTK? No thank you, that is way to complex for many simplish apps. I've written a Qt Quick / QML app recently for the N9. I honestly couldn't remember when it was the last time I had so much fun writing a GUI as with Qt Quick. Very easy, excellent data binding and spot-on for the task. It truly is perfect for those quick, heavily animated, finger friendly and asynchronous GUIs we've com to expect on mobiles. For the harder bits or more low-level system access the bridge with Qt / C++ is easy.
Then it went into a power dive. Remember that they were still the number one supplier of handsets in the world the month Elop was brought in.
Since you're so familiar with the details, care explaining how? Some detail, if you would. I'm curious as to how Qt 5 and the rest of Mer (the MeeGo-type core Linux platform they're using) is deficient, API wise.
Or is this yet another empty implication?
So they should have gone with an OS they were totally unfamiliar with, rather than one they were familiar with... why?
I'm a finn,so I know what "Jolla" means.
Jolla means a very small sailing boat - not meant for rescue, but meant for people who want to go sailing alone on a very small boat.
(who either cannot afford bigger boat or just likes very small boats)
Jollas cant be used as rescue boats, they are too small for that.
I am starting to worry whether we can rely on less popular open source software? In recent few years many of the open source libraries and software I use were discontinued.
- a few of the developers decided to produce commercial versions and sell for money
- a few others thought they need money for living and started developing new commercial projects with functionalists similar to the open source one but better (this category includes myself)
- a few others just gave up on the project and left the source code somewhere hoping that someone else will continue developing it
The reason might be the hard fact that you cannot work for free and pay for your life.
This question comes to my mind: Which open source projects we may trust (to rely on them)? ... perhaps those which have a better business and sustaining plan ?
All of the mobile-specific stuff is going into Qt Mobility. Anything missing will undoubtedly need to be added, I suspect that the team in question is aware of that.
No shit. Do keep in mind that this is the same team that developed the N9, I'm pretty sure they're aware of what deficiencies exist in the available APIs.
Your frequent "proclamations" or unsupported statements for or against things that, unless prompted, you never give reference to or back up. It's a very general thing that you have a habit of doing here on Slashdot.
No, I just find it highly annoying when people think others are supposed to just blindly believe what they say.
And jumping on board with a platform that is being shoveled out the door by HP, with no future development in sight, is a smart move to make? Who knows, they may adopt some of what's in webOS, maybe merge it into Qt. We don't have visibility into much more than what's been pointed out today. Odd that, given the sparse info, you're already making proclamations of their doom.
Then go back to your iOS development and let everyone else try to ensure there are more options than just Apple/Google, and maybe enjoy a niche. Not everyone needs to take on the two beasts out of the gate or serve every possible customer, they just need to be profitable.
Developing in C++/QT kicks C/GTK to the far side of the moon. Speaking as a longtime C hack.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
well consider its the successor to maemo, I'd say most of the nerds want one. Like they wanted maemo.
Why? its a gnu/linux cellphone. Nerds like gnu/liunx. This is slashdot. News for nerds. I'm pretty sure that to the average slashdot reader, that something this nerdy is a very big deal. Especially after the whole nokia/microsoft debacle. Again, nerds are smart people and aren't driven off by silly things like labels and driven towards marketing campaigns. They are driven because its going to be easy to modify with a great community, which makes it more of a hobby than a cellphone. Being nerds, modifying cellphones is a very legitimate hobby. Again this is slashdot.
Find your way back to gawker please.
there are always forks....
I used maemo, and I wish that meego could have stayed with the debian based and hildon desktop.
Hildon is free/open and will be included in Ubuntu Cellphone with 14.04
Demanding promises not to compete are not a feature of Finnish business life. In fact, it's the opposite: when laying off workers, Nokia has always pledged to help set them up with another firm doing something similar to what they were working on at Nokia. The idea is that since Nokia has decided some project no longer makes sense for its bottom line, it can't do any harm if people keep pursuing it at another firm.
This is what is playing out now with Jolla and has happened numerous times before with other Nokia spinoffs.
In fact, it isn't even using MeeGo, but Mer, which spun off from MeeGo when it became obvious that Nokia was going to walk away and Intel was off to pursue other things.
Mer was originally a community version of Maemo. I used Mer on my N800 before the N900 was launched. The current Mer is a natural continuation of this project, even if they relaunched it in some sense.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Hildon is being revived as a sub project of Mer.
Cordia Hildon-Desktop.
Which open source projects we may trust (to rely on them)?
none? even if there's a business behind it, there's no guarantee that business will be around tomorrow, and if there is a business behind it, you will find your destiny under control of said business.
as long as you have the source, you can always staff up and take over the project. you'd be in no worse of a situation than if you had staffed up and wrote the code from scratch yourself.
if you have multiple open source projects to choose from, there are obvious things to look for: active community, consistent releases, etc. of course none of those are guarantees it will be around tomorrow - when you are relying on people that aren't paid to do the work and can therefore on a whim choose to put their efforts in other places.
Nokia's Linux effort was worth billions to Microsoft. Billions to have it dead.
MS sees Linux as threat and it's their tune that Nokia dances to. Elop has gone out of his way* to ensure that there's no return to Linux at Nokia.
* Firing MeeGo and Meltemi teams and killing both projects, shutting down Salo factory where N9 was being made and laying off QT devs. Everything Linux related has been axed.