Coming out of Computex, there’s been a lot of momentum for Meego, the Linux-based platform that can power multiple computing devices, including handsets, netbooks, tablets, connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems. Ibrahim Haddad, the Linux Foundation director of technology and alliances, has just published a new article, “An Introduction to the Meego Project.”
It’s a great introductory piece on the platform, the benefits of the project and the role of the Linux Foundation. Below you will find an excerpt that I find especially interesting. I think Ibrahim captures the important points about MeeGo, many of which we raised in this recent Linux Foundation op-ed in BusinessWeek.
15 Facts You Must Know About MeeGo
1. Full open source project governed according to best practices of open source development: Open
discussion forums, open mailing lists, open technical steering committee meetings, peer review, open
bugzilla, etc.
2. Hosted under the auspices of the Linux Foundation
3. Aligned closely with upstream projects – MeeGo requires that submitted patches also be submitted to
the appropriate upstream projects and be on a path for acceptance (Figure 1)
4. Offers a complete software stack including reference user experience implementations
5. Offers a compliance program to ensure API and ABI compatibility
6. Enables all players of the industry to participate in the evolution of the software platform and to
build their own assets on MeeGo
7. Lowers complexity for targeting multiple device segments
8. Offers differentiation abilities through user experience customization
9. Provides a rich cross-platform development environment and tools
10. Offers a compliance program to certify software stacks and application portability
11. Supports multiple hardware architectures
12. Supports multiple app stores
13. Has no contributors agreements to sign; instead it follows the same “signed-off-by” language and
process as the Linux Kernel
14. Has over 1000 committed professional developers and hundreds of open source developers and a
very a vibrant community of users and developers (~ 8000 subscribed to meego.com)
15. MeeGo 1.0 Netbook release supports the following languages: Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified,
Chinese Traditional, Swedish, Polish, Finnish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Spanish,
Russian, Dutch, English, and British English.
For those of you interested in MeeGo it’s a great place to start. You can also check out http://www.meego.com of course for the latest news and to join the community itself.