Introduction to the MeeGo Software Platform

MeeGo is a vehicle for fostering mobile innovations through an open collaborative environment, promoting the exchange of ideas and source code, peer review, unifying development from across multiple device categories and driving contributions and technical work upstream to various open-source projects.

In addition, MeeGo contributes to Linux as a technical platform, as it combines mobile development resources that recently were split in the Maemo and Moblin Projects into one well-supported, well-designed project that addresses cross-platform, cross-device and cross-architecture development. Dozens of traditional Linux mobile and desktop efforts use many of the components used by MeeGo. They all benefit from the increased engineering efforts on those components. This is the power of the open-source development model.

The Linux Foundation (www.linuxfoundation.org) hosts the MeeGo Project as an open-source project, provides a vendor-neutral collaboration environment and encourages community contributions in line with the best practices of the open-source development model.

The Linux Foundation and MeeGo meet on various key points:

As owner of the MeeGo trademark, the Linux Foundation also is driving the creation of a MeeGo compliance program that will allow ISVs and OSVs to go through the compliance program and have their applications, distributions, devices and so on certified as MeeGo-compliant. Figure 5 illustrates the benefits of the compliance program to various players in the MeeGo ecosystem. MeeGo will enable applications developed with the MeeGo API to run on all devices running MeeGo-compliant OSes with segment-specific adaptations.

The Linux Foundation contributes to the MeeGo Project through its coordination efforts, overseeing MeeGo events; hosting a number of MeeGo-related technologies, services and collaboration tools; in addition to various marketing, legal, PR and other support activities. Furthermore, the Linux Foundation employs the maintainers of the cross-toolchain used by MeeGo and contributes the optimizations for multi-architecture support in the build service.

Figure 5. Benefits of the MeeGo Compliance Program to Various Ecosystem Players

MeeGo is a fully open-source software platform, hosted under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, and governed according to best practices of open-source development. Open mailing lists, discussion forums and contribution are open to all. It offers the best of Moblin and the best of Maemo to create a platform for multiple hardware architectures covering the broadest range of device segments.

MeeGo offers several opportunities to participate and help shape the future of the next-generation Linux platform. It will accelerate the adoption of Linux on mobile devices, Netbooks, pocket mobile devices, in-vehicle entertainment centers, connected TVs and mobile phones by implementing a truly open Linux platform across multiple architectures for next-generation computing devices. It is an open collaborative project between the project founders (Intel and Nokia), the community and various commercial and noncommercial partners bringing thousands of developers to work entirely out in the open, driving their contributions and technical work upstream making Linux the platform of choice for mobile computing devices. Visit MeeGo.com and be part of it!