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? 🙂

11 thoughts on “N900: a great milestone for the free software community

  1. Jamie Bennett

    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.

    Reply
  2. berto

    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)

    Reply
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  4. Faz

    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.

    Reply
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