Safe as Milk

Getting constructive about Nokia and maemo

There has been some criticism recently of Nokia and its handling of maemo - improving the state of affairs is one of the reasons why Quim contacted me and asked me if I’d be willing to work with the project to improve things.

The key to solving any problem is straightforward:

1. Identify and characterise the problem
2. Address one after the other the root causes of the problem
3. Evaluate the situation after each change

This is similar to Federico Mena Quintero’s characterisation of profiling code. In fact, a surprising array of problems are suitable for attach with measure, change, re-measure, rinse, repeat.

The over-riding arc I’ve been hearing so far is “Nokia is hoarding control over the project, and aren’t doing enough to help the maemo community”. I think that’s a mite unfair, and often I get the feeling that people on the mailing list are confusing a reality where there are problems, but they are poorly characterised, and malicious intent on the part of Nokia.

Some examples:

• No, Nokia isn’t all-powerful, and can’t make Google fix Reader so it works better in microb
• Parts of the platform are restricted and can’t easily be replaced with later versions. Let’s get an explanation for that, and talk to the right person to get it fixed. Right now we don’t have the reasoning behind the decision, and that’s what’s missing in characterising the problem
• “Nokia is keeping control of the project” - what are Nokia keeping control of? Let’s identify the list of resources that would be useful to community members, and work, one by one, on seeing if Nokia is actually keeping control of them
• “The N8×0 tablets ship with proprietary components” - my priority is to ensure that you have documentation for everything possible on the tablet, but to me, there are two different things, maemo, the community project, and the N8×0 tablets, which are commercial ventures using maemo [*]

So I plan to apply this optimisation technique to various problems in maemo. For each proposal I make, I will be looking for feedback from Nokia and the maemo community to see if it is a step in the right direction.

For a start, I will be proposing policies for access to maemo resources, including maemo.org email addresses, the maemo trademark (which is of course linked to the email addresses), and any parts of the maemo platform which community members don’t feel are sufficiently open.

My goal is not to get everything open in doing this. It is to make clear the limits of the maemo project, and in this way ensure that expectations on both sides of the equation are coherent. I hope that Nokia will accept the proposals I make, but even if there are arguments against, I believe those arguments can be open, and clearly understood by all involved.

* I don’t believe that there has ever been ambiguity about this - all of the tablet which can be open is open, but some decisions to use closed components were made in the interests of product differentiation, cost and other reasons. The N8×0 is not meant to be a completely Free product (unlike the Neo1971 or OLPC, which do aim to be completely Free). What we should insist on is that someone buying an N8×0 has all of the tools they need to paperweight it with custom, non-Nokia, software, and access as much of the hardware as possible with free software.

Hello planet Maemo!

I see that my blog is now aggregated on Planet Maemo (at least for Maemo related stuff) - all of you who want to get my off-Maemo ramblings on GNOME, the Libre Graphics Meeting, my life, or free software in general will just have to check out my journal at the source.

For those wondering why I’m here: I’m being funded by Nokia to help make the Maemo documentation community rock. I’ll be working a bit more than part-time on improving documentation organisation and processes, and removing roadblocks anywhere I can. If anyone has any problems with the documentation, reports of “bugs” with the organisation of docs, or has general suggestions for things that we can improve, I’m all ears.

I’m still feeling my way around, and with the forums, mailing lists and wiki, there are a lot of entry points to this community - but the best way to get started is to start solving real problems, and over the next few days I’ll be working to resolve some outstanding website bugs and get access to everything I need to do that.

Oh - and if anyone has any hints for solving the Numpty Physics level where the yellow ball is in a kind of snail’s shell, I’d love to hear them. And is it possible to delete the last stroke with the N810? I haven’t figured it out yet.

Back from China

Last week I was in China for the first Linux Foundation/COPU China Developers Symposium. I met a bunch of people for the first time, including Jonathan Corbet, Matt Keenan and Andrew Morton from the kernel, Fred Muller, Ollo, Pokey, Anthony and all the others from the Beijing LUG (thanks for the welcome guys!), and Angela Brown from the Linux Foundation.

I also got a chance to catch up with some people I had met before including Jim Zemlin and Bill Weinberg, both of whom had very encouraging things to say about GNOME in mobile platforms. In fact, I will be organising a meeting of GNOME Mobile at the upcoming Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Austin, Texas in April.

After the conference, Angela organised a tourist trip for a gang of us to climb the Great Wall at Badaling and visit the Forbidden City and Tianemen Square on Thursday, which was great fun. Although after the field trip which we had with the BLUG gang after dinner on Wednesday evening I don’t think either myself or herself were in the greatest of form.

I gave a presentation entitled “2008, year of…” where I poked fun at the annual articles we get at the beginning of the year claiming that “this year will be the year of Linux on the desktop”, and yet…

Every year, we have seen significant gaps being filled - in the early ’90s, it was application gaps, like Evolution, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Eclipse. There was the advent of successful funding runs for free software-based companies like Ximian.

Then it was corporate support. RedHat, Sun and Novell threw their weigh behind free software and bet on GNOME. Ubuntu making a distribution designed and tailored for a mass market), and increasingly momentum from ISVs who now target the free software desktop. Most recently, IBM releasing a beautifully integrated Lotus Notes comes to mind, previous examples of major ISVs targeting Linux include VMWare and Adobe.

We have seen the importance of standards and data take center stage with the standardisation of ODF, and the move by a number of governments to insist that all public data be stored in open formats - resulting in the (flawed) standardisation process of OOXML being launched by Microsoft.

In addition, we have seen new paths to market open up for Linux based PCs - WalMart selling Everex PCs, OEMs finally offering Linux based desktops, and Dell, Lenovo, HP shipping laptops with a free software OS pre-installed.

We have also seen considerable momentum in GNOME-based UIs outside of desktop computing - hand-helds from Nokia, phones from OpenMoko, lab measurement devices from Vernier, set-top-box applications, and of course OLPC and the Eee PC.

And through it all, a healthy peppering of massive institutional deployments - Extremadura and Andalucia, the Korean government, the French gendarmerie, Sao Paolo’s telecentros project, PSA in France, and on and on.

And so, as I look back over the decade which saw Linux have its first Superbowl ad, I wonder at how far we’ve come, and I believe I can say without being ridiculous that the ’00s has in some sense been the decade of Linux on the desktop.

We have not yet made a breakthrough in market share, but we have momentum in every sector - the quality of our platform, the number of ISDs developing applications for GNOME, the number of organisations investing cold hard cash in using, developing and deploying our work, the size of our user-base. I am enormously hopeful that we will continue to make progress in the coming years.

GStreamer, Fluendo and Collabora

I tagged an announcement by Collabora that they were hiring Christian, Edward and Wim from GStreamer, formerly of Fluendo, with the comment “Is this how Free Software acquisitions work?”

That got some response in the comments, and especially from Julien Mouette, CEO of Fluendo.

First, let me say that I wish the project well. I’m convinced that GStreamer is a core part of Collabora’s activity, and that GStreamer consultancy will make up a decent chunk of revenue for them. I also expect that Fluendo will continue to invest in a core technology that they depend on for their growing range of products, and that others depending on GStreamer such as Nokia will continue to support and encourage its development.

Julien confirms that Fluendo are continuing investment in GStreamer (great!), and affirms that all of a sudden, it’s just become a much more open project, since people are spread across many companies.

I hope that’s the case, but it’s not an automatic consequence of a few people leaving. Project governance is much more complicated than who employs the N most active hackers.

In the past, there has been rumblings that decisions affecting the project were being made in private in Barcelona, and then discovered by the community (see comment on GStreamer design - I remember other similar comments, but can’t find them right now).

GStreamer’s not alone in this - pretty much every project with one primary company sponsor/owner runs into the problem (OOo, Java, Mozilla, Evolution, and yes, even OpenWengo come to mind). The results are that company employees feel frustrated that they’re not getting community traction, and the community is frustrated because they have a feeling the company is looking for cheap labour to implement its agenda, rather than equal partners.

Whether GStreamer in particular becomes a more open project depends, now, on the governance model that is put in place. A model can be informal and ad-hoc, as long as it’s efective. Who gets to say what goes into the main tree? What’s the patch review process? Who are the core developers who can just commit? If those processes aren’t in place, or if one company controls all of the processes, then you will continue to see the kinds of problems which OpenOffice is currently seeing, even if there are many companies and individuals bearing the burden of development.

The future of GNOME?

A few days ago, I was asked for an interview what I thought the future of GNOME held - in the context of the recent LUGRadio episode (where GNOME’s lack of direction and leadership was cited as a major reason why we’re not making any revolutionary change to the desktop) I thought it was relevant and worth wider distribution.

We will see is one of two things happen - either GNOME will grow beyond what it is currently, and develop a number of different façades which will become GNOME releases (such as OLPC GNOME, LinEx GNOME, Enterprise GNOME, Home & Small Office GNOME, etc) or we will end up shrinking to something smaller than we currently are - the most important GNOME product will be the platform, which will then be re-used by third parties to build the interfaces they’re interested in on top of it.

We have already started to see this trend - distributors cherry-pick the applications they are interested in for their own desktop projects, which are then themed and targetted for their core audience. The variety of platforms and human interfaces being built upon the GNOME platform is dazzling - these go from small form-factor interfaces like the Nokia N800 and the Maemo application framework and OpenMoko and GPE through to innovative interfaces like Sugar from OLPC, which is totally unfamiliar to someone used to the GNOME desktop, but which is undeniably GNOME based. Even the major distributions have modified the GNOME interface to suit their needs - the OpenSuse, Red Hat Enterprise and Ubuntu desktops all behave in different ways, and have different target audiences.

Clearly, when you see groups like ACCESS, Nokia, OLPC, Sun, Novell, Red Hat and pretty much every other software producer and distributor in the free software market opening up their own internal sources, their preference is clear - they want to encourage common spaces of collaboration, and concentrate only on differentiation.

The project has the choice of embracing this trend, and becoming a place where this kind of targetted development happens in a co-ordinated (free software) way, or letting the trend pass us by, and have each distributor in the market have their own specialised interface, or search for collaboration elsewhere, and simply use the GNOME platform as just another building block.

Mad Props Eitan and Brad

During SCALE, Eitan Isaacson and Brad Taylor were demo animals on the GNOME stand (photo shamelessly linked from Scott Ruecker’s LXer article series) - I failed miserably to make good on my promise to spend at least a half-day on the stand - in the end, I was there for about an hour showing off the N800’s Jingle video call capability with Eitan, and demoing Dasher’s text input reasonably successfully.

At the end of Sunday, I was caught up jabbering away to people, and didn’t even get a chance to clean up the stand & say goodbye.

So - thanks Eitan and Brad, and goodbye See you both next year?

Update: I found a nicer picture (with me in it) from Celeste Paul of KDE-usability - we had a nice chat and messed about with the Nokia N800s we had quite a bit. Yes, I know I need a haircut, no need to remind me.

Oracle to ship RedHat?

There’s an interesting article on ZDNet about comments from Larry Ellison that Oracle should be shipping “a full stack of software” to customers.

What’s most surprising about this is that it’s news.

HP already ships a choice of full stacks of software which are certified for their servers (and laptops). Nokia ships a full stack of software which is taylor-made for the 770. OLPC will be shipping a full custom-tailored stack of software on their laptops.

A common usecase for Oracle customers is to have one server doing nothing but serving a database. Doesn’t it make sense for Oracle to do the tuning work and make sure that the system is optimised for that usecase, and then ship a fully functional system to their clients?

In addition, your clients suddenly no longer have to ask themselves what distribution is best for their Oracle database server - the answLiveCDs for everything and anything and VMWare and Xen appliances?

Free software gives you the freedom to take and adapt software to your needs, and also to the needs of your clients. The only real question is what took them so long?

770 adapter: update

Thanks to all who commented on how to get an adaptor for my 770 - several of you mentioned that the chargers are the sam as for the Nokia N70, N90 and others. So I got one of those, but can’t help but feel that I was a bit fleeced - I paid €15 for it. And that was after shopping around in a big department and 2 specialist mobile phone stores.

Thank you, O Lazyweb, thou art wise and knoweth all things.

770 power adapter

I recently lost my adapter/recharger for my Nokia 770 - anyone know where/how I can get a replacement?

Nokia 770

I joined the growing club of people who received their Nokia 770 today. Woohoo!

I didn’t manage to get the bluetooth to work with the mac, and I don’t have wifi set up on my freebox, so for the moment there’s not much I can do with it, but that’s not going to stop me from playing.