QA with Nokia's Ari Jaaksi: MeeGo Revs Up

Nokia’s Vice President of MeeGo Devices, Ari Jaaksi, will kick off the afternoon at today’s Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit with his keynote at 1:15 p.m. PT. He took a few minutes with us this morning to share what he’ll be speaking about and how the MeeGo project is going.

Today you are keynoting at the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit. Can you give us a preview of what you’re going to be sharing with the audience?

Jaaksi: My keynote will share a bit of history, including Nokia’s experiences with Linux and Maemo, and how we take that forward. I’ll also share why Intel and Nokia chose to create this project, some recent milestones, and how developers can get involved.
 
How is the “big merge” going and are things on track to deliver MeeGo v1.0 in Q2?

Jaaksi: We’re moving right along and making great progress. Following the initial announcement at Mobile World Congress, we’ve released the MeeGo core operating system repositories – anyone can go to meego.com and download this package for free. And just yesterday, a number of leading companies spanning chipset designers, device manufacturers, software vendors and more announced their support for MeeGo
 
We’re well on our way toward the MeeGo 1.0 release – – I invite readers to come to my presentation or visit meego.com to learn about what’s next.
 
How do Maemo and Moblin developer communities complement each other?

Jaaksi: Moblin brings in a group of very talented developers. They have a world-class build infrastructure and experience working with upstream projects. They know how to work with different products and architectures.
 
Maemo is one of the largest open source communities in the mobile space. Maemo brings in the expertise of mobile devices, ARM based technologies and consumer products. The Maemo community also knows what it takes to build a consumer product — to the end — with quality and finish.
 
By bringing together developers from the Maemo and Moblin communities together, we’re broadening the base for innovative ideas to transpire.
 
Can you tell us more about Qt and what it brings to the MeeGo project?

Jaaksi: Qt is a cross-platform application and UI framework used by hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide looking to create amazing user experiences on Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Maemo devices. Qt will be the primary application framework for MeeGo and both Intel and Nokia are committing their investment in it.  For developers interested in MeeGo, Qt helps increase the scope for their applications and services across multiple platforms, all using consistent application APIs.
 
How will the open development model and working so closely with upstream partners help to position MeeGo for success?

Jaaksi: MeeGo is a full open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation and governed according to best practices of open source development. As in other true open source projects, technical decisions are made based on technical merit of the code contributions being made.
 
In the end, Nokia, Intel and our upstream partners share a vision of mobile computing devices and the increasing importance of wireless connectivity – together, through the open MeeGo project, we will help to drive rapid innovation, adoption and consumer choice.
 
And already now, anybody can participate and see what we are doing. Code is developed in the open and decisions are made openly in meetings.
 
How are you bringing new contributors to the project? Do you see momentum?

Jaaksi: The beauty of the MeeGo project is that anyone can join and contribute. We’ve seen lots of interest in the project to-date, as evidenced by yesterday’s ecosystem release.
 
It’s only been two months since we announced MeeGo, and we’re seeing the momentum every day. With the first MeeGo devices due to market in the second half of this year, the project has no plans of slowing down anytime soon!