Maemo.org is for application development and Sardine is ... a fish

Maemo basics

Maemo.org is an open source development environment for Nokia Internet Tablets. Its primary goal is to enable application development for the Internet Tablets. The application catalogue demonstrates that it works.

The vast majority of our software components originate from existing open source projects. In many cases, we want to develop the components further for the Nokia 770. We want to enhance functionality, improve performance, make them fit into our resource limited environment and so forth. Such development doesn't happen under maemo.org. We do not want to fork the development and take it under maemo.org. Instead, we go and participate the projects, enhance the technology there, and then take and integrate the enhanced components into our platform.

So, we
1) participate various open source projects. We then
2) source software components from these joint development projects and
3) integrate them for Nokia 770. We then
4) publish the integrated Nokia 770 software and development tools at maemo.org and
5) offer them as a platform for application developers

Got it? Good.

Sardine extreme

So what's with the maemo Sardine then? Now that is something else -- it is a new interesting experiment!

The maemo Sardine is our attempt to let others to participate the development and integration of our application framework. It is an unstable version of of the Hildon application framework. It contains the latest version of the application framework and several other components. The purpose of the Sardine is to:

• Enable Maemo application developers to follow the latest changes to our application framework, so they can test their applications against the latest changes, update them as a result of any API changes and pilot the latest additions to the APIs. All within a comfortable timeframe before a stable release of the software for the end-users.
• Enable anybody to participate in the development of our firmware and see where it’s heading at
  

We will launch new software releases and new products in the future -- but we won't launch them quite yet. However, the source code is there for you to see. So you can start to prepare your applications for our future products -- or you can participate the actual development of those products. If you are a maemo developer, I suggest you go and check it out!

I claim that the maemo Sardine is pretty unique. How many other companies share the source code of their yet to be announced products?