Collaboration summit 2010 has been very interesting this year especially because of all the buzz that MeeGo has caused. It seems that all those gigantic companies like Intel, Nokia and IBM are all about linux and the way how they do it, is very open.
IBM
The most essential message here has been that don’t do things behind the closed doors, do it in public, do it in the community and contribute, contribute and contribute. In the second keynote IBM’s Vice President, Open System Development Dr. Daniel Fry told everyone how things can go wrong if you try to make business from open source in a way that companies usually do.
Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation & Dr. Daniel Frye, IBM
The message was that don’t create your own community, make your developers to join the community and contribute to the upstream. Also the code that you contribute should be general enough, not specialized to your own purposes.
Nokia
Ari Jaaksi from Nokia was a real blockbuster and made the room full of audience. The message was pretty much same as in the Frye’s presentation. Jaaksi told that MeeGo is bringing the brightest minds of the industry together and it should give the best UX for MeeGo users. The UX comes basically from a platform. The platform provides multitasking, the best mobile browser in the market and the best communication for people. I guess you have heard Nokia’s slogan: “Connecting People”.
Ari Jaaksi, Vice President Maemo Devices & MeeGo Operations
Jaaksi explained why they decided to have collaboration only with Intel and not with more companies. The reason for this was that it’s faster get things up and running when there are only two big companies together. In the next step of MeeGo is to prove to people, that it truly is an open source and open. Open in this context means that even the steering group meetings are public meetings in irc.
Intel
Imad Sousou from Intel, continued Jaaksi’s keynote with the same message. Good addition was that MeeGo will provide the same set of APIs for every MeeGo device and MeeGo applications will run on all MeeGo platforms. Interesting point was also the fact, that devices may contain closed source components like device drivers (from hardware manufacturers) or closed source applications and libraries like Skype or flash player. The reason for this is that some of the manufacturers just don’t want to share their driver code.
Imad Sousou, Director, Open Source Technology Center, Intel
Sousou made clear that MeeGo is not just for phones, it’s for Netbooks, IVI, TVs etc and of course it’s open. Imad also announced that there will be a MeeGo conference in September 2010. I will wait that event. At least the previous two Maemo Summits have been really nice events.
Google and Android
Google was also present here in the Collaboration Summit. Chris DiBona, from Google gave a pretty fun presentation. Google has received plenty of criticism because what they do, is not always very open.
Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager at Google
Chris’ presentation got really much attention here especially at the end because they promised to give a new Google Nexus One phone for everyone. Well when the room is full of nerds, it’s always quite easy to get their attention by giving new gadgets.
Qt Quick
I’ve been working with Qt for several years. Therefore I’m really interested in what’s happening in the Qt world and I’m trying to follow the new technologies even before they are released. Henrik Hartz from Qt Development Frameworks gave a good presentation about the new technology called Qt Quick.
Henrik Hartz, Product Manager, Qt Development Frameworks
Henrik demonstrated how powerful Qt Quick is when you need to develop neat looking UI’s with animations and transitions. He also showed couple of code examples how easily and fast you can create cool UIs. One of the ideologies behind the Qt Quick is to bring UI designers closer to the actual software development. UI designers can quite easily to create prototypes of the UI and still use the real business logic, implemented in C++.
Qt Quick Architecture
This will of course bring new challenges to the team work and requires that the interfaces exposed to QML from the C++ side must be designed well.
QML looks promising and I have already started to implement small QML application called QuickFlickr. Personally I think that it’s amazing how fast you can build UI from scratch. Of course, if you have Qt background, it helps you to get into Qt Quick easier.
The Future of Linux
The future of linux looks promising now. In my opinion it looked promising even in five years ago:) Linux is pretty much everywhere and it’s getting more popular all the time. The instances like Linux Foundation are getting bigger and more money moves around the Linux. It’s really interesting to see where all this MeeGo stuff will go and what kind of form it will get.
The summit itself was really nice place to hang out, meet other nerds and discuss about a nerd stuff. I’m really waiting to get to the MeeGo summit or to the Qt Developer days in the next autumn, but before that, I really need to figure out how to get back to the Europe:)
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