N900: a great milestone for the free software community
With all the fuss that’s going on around the announcement of the Nokia N900, I honestly didn’t want to write yet another post about it.
But I can’t resist :-)
I’m not going to talk about its features or its specs. I just want to say that it’s really exciting for me to see the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones releasing a high-end handset with a GNU/Linux-based operating system.
I think that this is a great milestone for the free software movement as a whole, because none of this could have been possible without all the work that Linux, GNOME, Debian and other projects have been doing before this.
Being part of the N900 team, of course I want this new device to hit the big time; but what I really want to see is not just the success of this particular model, but the proof that free software has entered the mobile phone market to stay. For good.
Let’s make it happen.
Did I say I’m excited? :-)
Posted: August 27th, 2009 under English, Planet GPUL, Planet Gnome, Planet Igalia, Planet Maemo, Software.
Comments: 10
Comments
Comment from aboalgabb
Time: August 27, 2009, 7:02 pm
Maemo is there to stay…..it will change the the world of mobiles
Comment from Jamie Bennett
Time: August 27, 2009, 7:15 pm
Good points and I agree with most but you could argue that Google showed the way of the Linux phone with Android.
Nether-the-less, today’s announcement (and lets not forget its an announcement and ‘real’ users haven’t got to test it properly yet) is a clear signal that the worlds largest mobile phone vendor is 100% behind Linux on the mobile phone.
Well done Nokia.
Comment from berto
Time: August 27, 2009, 7:31 pm
Jamie: of course I didn’t mean that this was the first phone in the world to run Linux :) I don’t want to detract from Google or Palm.
But the fact that it’s the world’s largest phone manufacturer and that is running a Debian-based system with most of the same components and development tools that you have in your desktop computer makes it even more exciting.
Android is Linux, but the N900 is GNU/Linux, if you know what I mean :-) (no religious war intended)
Comment from Anonymous
Time: August 27, 2009, 9:52 pm
Free software and yet no Theora/Vorbis/Matroska support….
Comment from berto
Time: August 27, 2009, 10:10 pm
Yeah, it’s a shame that they didn’t include those codecs by default, but fortunately that’s something we can solve: http://twitter.com/quimgil/status/3586568219
Comment from Daniel “NeoStrider” Monteiro
Time: August 28, 2009, 2:42 am
Being a open source maemo game developer since the project announcement (late 2005, right?) its really a exciting time for me. Im very proud of it.
Now, the big question: Ovi Store for Maemo?
Comment from foo
Time: August 28, 2009, 5:18 am
It would be nice if the site mentioned Maemo is Debian based. Ubuntu also failed in this regard a while ago.
Comment from berto
Time: August 28, 2009, 11:27 am
foo:
Pingback from Two months after… « root'ing the net
Time: September 25, 2009, 12:10 pm
[...] was the announcement of the shiny Nokia N900. I have resisted the temptation then, because a lot of things have already been said about it. We systems administrators are usually in the shadows, but even so [...]
Comment from Faz
Time: November 29, 2009, 12:41 pm
Any plans on a Maemo 5 / N900 version of Vagalume please?
Migrated from N810 + E90 to an N900 for a few days and I’m really missing my favourite Last.fm app.
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