770 feedback

Howdy,

Just a short one this time.

We've been receiving a lot of valuable feedback on our 770 hardware from you. Based on it we decided to continue fixing bugs on 770 and release new software for it. This work will happen on our "hacker version" branch. We'll do our best to make it usable for you.

See Quim's post on the subject.

More later ....

GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative

"The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative will advance the use, development and commercialization of GNOME components as a mobile and embedded user experience platform. It brings together industry leaders, expert consultants, key developers and the community and industry organizations they represent."

I’m very pleased to see many other companies and initiatives moving towards using GNOME in consumer devices. We’ve been investing into GNOME for years and the open and even playfield that GNOME provides is serving us very well. We plan to continue strongly with GNOME and direct many of our activities through it. Our whole open source strategy relies primarily on strong upstream project participation – GNOME being a good example.

See the press release, too

The Linux Foundation

This is an old news already but we are now working with the Linux foundation.

I've noticed that companies are seting up different forums and clubs to standardize/promote/develop Linux/open source based technologies for mobile/consumer/embedded devices. I have my doubts... I do not fully understand how they plan to work. I'd go directly to places like the kernel.org or to GNOME to get things agreed, aligned, and -the most of all- developed. These are the communities that do the actual work and I'm not sure how these additional forums add value.

It may be that big companies are so used to do high level standardization and high level business deals that the simple community work doesn't seem real to them. They do not know how to deal with open source development, so they try to change it into something they are more familiar with: NDAs, business deals, and standardization forums.

I believe the Linux Foundation is slightly different. It is a forum dedicated to a specific open source project, Linux. And it promotes the community aspect of the work at hand.