The first ever meego conference rolled to an end on Wednesday night and now everyone is back home. The dust has settled and now the time to contemplate and discuss what we have learned, expected, enjoyed and disappointed with in the conference. Below are thoughts of the Meego conference as a whole.
This was a developer conference and as such we had already been tipped not to expect any earth shattering hardware announcements (we feel your pain).
The Event was Held in at the Aviva stadium in Dublin and I don’t think we could of asked for a grander setting. With multiple function rooms, eating areas and lavatories (always a good idea) it served the event well. Once each attendee had registered they were given a a welcome pack that consisted of a free MeeGo T-Shirt, Umbrella and Event Literature. Then it was on to the keynote speakers keynote speakers who were: Dough Fisher (Intel), Alberto Torres (Nokia),Dominique Le Foll (Amino Comms Ltd), Imad Sousou (Intel), Jim Zemlin (The Linux Foundation) and Valtteri Halla (Nokia)
So what was the message for Developers
Basically collaboration is the new name of the game and the only way forward is to embrace open OS way of working in an upstream first model. As this was a community based event these words were music to the ears of many of the participants but it still left us wondering what the true inner circle of Nokia and Intel would make of this, as this move is easier for some than others.
I found one thing that seemed to resonate true through the whole conference and that was the aspect of Unity. If it was Unity for all Developers to work together for a common goal or Unity of the hospitality shown or the Unity of the Community that participated, you could not get away from it, this is something that Mr. Apple and Mr. Microsoft can not come close to. Greed can not conquer all.
Open OS, what does it mean ? It means this is “Your” OS. Take it. Do with it what you please and for everything good that you do with it then pass the good code back “upstream” through the core for others to share and do what they want. There are already some companies like WeTab, Linpus and Amino are doing that are already running with Meego 1.0 and 1.1.
Developers and others got a huge boost for their Meego productivity when Dough Fisher anounced that Intel & Nokia would be giving EVERYONE at the conference a FREE Lenovo S10-3t Notebook. The only condition of getting it was that people had to put MeeGo on the notebook before it left the room. This as you can imagine wasn’t much of a problem or issue to many.
Another major announcement felt by the community was Chris Schlaeger announcing AMD’s decision to get involved with Meego, giving them further options to run MeeGo on their devices and also other manufacturers to utilise AMD chipsets. This can only be seen as a win-win situation and in my opinion this move can not be under estimated.
This event was a real eye opener for me as it was the first community based linux open source event I have ever been to. Mostly the others were coroprate based.
The Open OS framework has positives of collaboration and traditionally not as well funded as its corporate rivals, but this conference turned that on its head as quoted by Ronan MacLaverty : “MeeGo is possibly the best funded open source OS there is“. It was announced that we will have two conferences per year with the second MeeGo Conference coming in 2011 May 23 – 25 in San Francisco.
Next on the horizon we have got CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2011 in Las Vegas which we are hopefully attending and hoping there are more MeeGo hardware related announcements (not necessarily handsets) that we will report on.
