Saturday 12 February 2011

What now for MeeGo?

So Nokia has dramatically reduced commitment to MeeGo and has cited, amongst other thinks, MeeGo's inability to deliver a focussed baseline with sufficient speed. I happen to agree with this failure (and given Nokia was a significant part of MeeGo's management I don't think there's a blame issue - more a how do we fix it issue)

Assumptions and observations:

  • MeeGo is intended to provide a viable but focussed baseline upon which vendors can build compliant products; not to be an expansive and 'complete' linux distribution.
  • MeeGo has limited dedicated resourcs and focusing them on a reduced MeeGo core will improve quality.
  • MeeGo's main customers are not end-users - they are device vendors : they should be the focus of our core engineering team's design, delivery and QA effort.
  • MeeGo core does not appreciate the difficulties a vendor has in tracking MeeGo;
  • A visibly secure development model is important to the perceived integrity of MeeGo - so visibly restricting write access to the core is important.

Proposal:

  • MeeGo Core is confirmed as not being a linux distribution
  • An open MeeGo project (openMeeGo?) is created on the community infrastructure to provide a reference MeeGo distribution
  • Packages not *essential* to the delivery of a compliant MeeGo Core are moved into the community OBS (emacs, vi etc - maybe even the reference UXes) where they are available for use by development teams and end users.
  • "openMeeGo" acts as a reference vendor and provides a forum for reviewing and improving the processes MeeGo uses to communicate releases
  • MeeGo community (which includes core developers) has a significantly lower barrier to entry.