Jolla promises MeeGo will live on, plans new smartphone to reward the faithful

http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/07/jolla-promises-meego-will-live-on-plans-new-smartphone/

by shrikant • 14 years ago

40 18 14 years ago

engadget.com

rbanffy4• 14 years ago

If they ever manage to launch a phone and become a threat to WP7, Nokia will sue them out of existence.

ajross2• 14 years ago

Sue them for using open source software that Nokia itself released? That sounds amusing.

No, this is fine legally. What's more difficult is that huge chunks of "Nokia MeeGo" (which is frustratingly different from "Intel MeeGo" in a lot of ways) aren't actually open source. They released most of the middleware, but none of the apps.

ConstantineXVI• 14 years ago

Presuming Nokia had the desire to sue them, it would more than likely be about trade secrets (assuming there's a Finnish equivalent) vs. the software itself. Bunch of ex-Nokia employees, it'd be easy to make a case (despite any merit) that one of them is using some Nokia secrets they shouldn't be.

rbanffy4• 14 years ago

That's an interesting reasoning. I wonder how many patents Nokia has that will be useless against Android because Nokia released MeeGo as open source.

Right now, I consider Nokia a tool for Microsoft to push Windows Phone onto the market. Whether they consider this a distraction or a threat will be evident by their reaction.

machia• 14 years ago

In the bbs-o-spheare there is talk that Nokia is actually supporting Jolla (patents, recruitings).

shmerl• 14 years ago

Nokia can't. They contributed to Meego (which is inherited in Mer) under the terms of GPL. All they can do is to bite their elbows now for ditching Meego.

pm90• 14 years ago

I really really really hope they do succeed. I have seen my friends N9 and its an absolutely amazing phone....except that nobody (except hobbyist's) develop for it

nakkiel• 14 years ago

I couldn't agree more. The phone is a good device and the OS is ready for prime time.

densh• 14 years ago

I was really excited until they mentioned a rewrite in favor of "Html5". It's really hard for me to understand why do sane people choose resource-hungry technology to work on resource-constrained hardware despite existence of much better alternatives (Qt) over and over again. This doesn't make any sense to me. There will be performance issues for sure. The same way as they were with WebOS which happily consumed 1GB of ram (Touchpad) when 256MB would be more than enough for a native solution and could have provided a much better end-used experience (Original iPad.)

WebOS heavily relies on Qt itself. Significant amount of internal infrastructure is written using it. I can't understand why didn't they officially provide Qt as a alternative way to write Apps for WebOS. It must have been a political decision ("we are WebOS, not QtOS".)

Blackberry people are the ones who actually understood how good Qt actually is for such kind of thing and they are pushing it now as the native toolkit.

Qt could have become a common denominator for mobile operating systems outside of the Android/iOS world. It would have helped with shortage of applications (as developers could have hypothetically wrote a very similar app for Blackberry, MeeGo and WebOS at the same time) and would ease porting of successful apps from iOS.

bergie2• 14 years ago

Jolla is apparently basing their work on Mer, the community-managed mobile OS core that emerged from the ashes of MeeGo: http://merproject.org/

Mer apparently runs both Qt/QML and HTML5 happily, so I don't see why this has to be one or the other. The Cordia UX built on Mer even builds on GTK3.

bergie2• 14 years ago

I wrote down some lessons from the Maemo and MeeGo times in light of the Jolla announcement. Long read but can give some perspective http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/meego-diaspora/

mikecane• 14 years ago

It's the Harmattan UI that makes MeeGo on the N9 so gorgeous. I don't suppose they can use that?

Jolla promises MeeGo will live on, plans new smartphone to reward the faithful

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