Moblin & Maemo Make Love: Out Comes MeeGo

Over the weekend we started hearing from PR folks that there would be a joint Intel and Nokia news announcement on Monday that would be of interest to us, and today we found out that's indeed the case. The Mobile World Conference is currently taking place in Spain with all sorts of mobile platform announcements coming out for both Microsoft and Linux, but this one announcement today is that Intel and Nokia are joining forces on the mobile front by marrying their platforms together, Moblin and Maemo, respectively. The end product of combining Moblin and Maemo is a new project called MeeGo.

As was said by Intel's Imad Sousou on the new Meego web-site:

I'm sure you've heard the news: Moblin and maemo are merging! We are taking the best pieces from these two open source projects and are creating the MeeGo software platform. Both teams have worked for a long time to support the needs of the mobile user experience - and MeeGo will make this even better. We want it to be fun, focused, flexible, technically challenging and ultimately, something that can change the world.

We all use mobile devices every day. The power and capability of handhelds has reached astounding levels - netbooks have been a runaway success - and connected TVs, tablets, in-vehicle infotainment, and media phones are fast growing new markets for devices with unheard of performance. Our goal is to develop the best software to go with those devices. The teams behind maemo and Moblin have plenty of experience and even more ideas on how to make things better - and together we will create something special.

On the technical end we know that the first previews of MeeGo should be available next quarter and that the tool-kit of choice will be Qt. Nokia bought out Trolltech in 2008 the company behind this toolkit originally popular on KDE systems and then spun it out as Qt Software while Intel has been heavily using the Clutter tool-kit. Intel is a major stakeholder in this tool-kit that supports OpenGL / OpenGL ES, but with MeeGo they are changing some or all of their focus to Qt. It will be interesting to see how this affects the development of Clutter especially with this tool-kit being used by more GNOME projects with the GNOME 3.0 milestone.

MeeGo will also use RPM packages and we are currently working out details on some other aspects of this combined Maemo and Moblin project. At least we know it should boot fast and look beautiful.