Re: [Fsuk-manchester] MeBoo and Android

[Tim Dobson]

On 02/06/10 00:15, Luke Taylor wrote:
> 
> I think that any discussion of MeGoo (or whatever it's called now) would be 
> much more popular if it was a discussion about MeeGo and Android. I know a 
> few people who are massive android geeks and would be v. interested. If 
> people fancy, I would be more than happy to research and prepare a talk about 
> how free Android is and what it means for free software as well as privacy 
> issues etc. to compliment the MeMoo talk - what do folks think?

Meego's biggest problem when you try & evaluate whether its free or not
is that you run into the problem that it's not been released and no-one
really has a bleeding clue about it.

I can talk at length about the plans that Maemo had for version 6,
including their free phone stack.

Here's a fairly dated [the n900 hadn't been released at the time]
article comparing maemo to android.

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/10/27/1335227/Comparing-the-Freedoms-Offered-By-Maemo-and-Android
http://cool900.blogspot.com/2009/10/comparing-freedom-on-maemo-and-android.html

from my perspective, I'll admit the key difference is technological:
the maemo userland is pretty similar to that of a gnu/linux desktop -
Xorg, gtk/qt etc. The fact that maemo uses the debian package system
make it better and better [even if they did manage to create dependancy
hell through bad QA].

The android stack of free [as in freedom] but proprietary framebuffer
with userland based on Android's own sdk - a free [as in freedom] but
propriety version java the more I get uncomfortable...

Still, people have created their own android distros sucessfully - it's
been ported to the openmoko freerunner and yet I'm yet to see a
community spun maemo distro.

interesting stuff!

Tim