I’ve been with Nokia for close to half a year now and in that time span I’ve had dinner with my international team twice. It’s always nice to break bread with the people you’ve been working with over email, instant messenger and on the phone.
The first dinner was just that, dinner. We found a restaurant, we ordered a meal and some beer, talked about work, life, the industry and then went our separate ways.
The second dinner however was a team building event. Nokia booked a chef who then split us up into groups that had everyone take part in creating a portion of the meal we would be collectively enjoying. To say I enjoyed that evening more would be an understatement; it was fantastic.
Why do I bring this up?
I’ve been to the S60 Summit before, the operating system that powers devices like the Nokia N95, and now that I’ve come home from Berlin where the first Maemo Summit was held I feel that the different experiences between the two Summits reflect the dinner served versus dinner created analogy.
Maemo is Nokia’s attempt at creating an open source Linux based operating system for a category of devices known as Internet Tablets. They’re not mobile phones; they’re more like one of those new smaller than a laptop larger than smart phone type devices that have been flooding the market recently. Some may even classify Maemo devices as a MID (Mobile Internet Device) while others would call them a UMPC (Ultra Mobile Personal Computer). Semantics aside, the Maemo Summit was all about the open source community. Developers, developers, developers, to quote Steve Ballmer, was the main emphasis of this event.
It was absolutely brilliant seeing Nokia employees talk about the operating system in such depths that even I had to whip out a laptop during the presentations to quickly figure out was was being discussed. The amount of technical information being distributed was unprecedented. The attendees were eating it up since they are the people who build applications and try to improve the platform in their spare time. I was in awe witnessing all of this, but to be honest I felt as if I didn’t belong.
The S60 Summit is all about celebrating the platform, talking about the future of the platform and showing off the applications developers have built. Sounds just like the Maemo Summit right?
It’s technical to a certain extent, but the event is more about the consumer and OEMs rather than the developers and platform hackers. The S60 Summit was filled with marketing people; the Maemo Summit was filled with developers. The S60 Summit had a party that many people showed up to wearing suits and business casual outfits, the Maemo Summit had a party that was a bunch of guys in tshirts eating pizza and drinking beer.
How open is Maemo? The logo was created by someone from the community where as the S60 brand is something that was conjured up by Nokia people internally who had to make sure the color scheme would be well accepted internationally.
The Maemo Summit is all about raw enthusiasm from the open source community coming together and telling Nokia what they want to see happen and for Nokia to tell the people what their roadmap will contain going forward.
Things started getting uncomfortable when someone mentioned that not being able to code is a disability. There are plenty of people who love Nokia products, but they’ll never touch a line of code in their lives. There are different levels of passion: people who enjoy using the products Nokia creates and then people who want to go above and beyond and write applications and hack the platform as they see fit. Where as most events have an 80/20 split of the first category mixed with the later, this event was more like 10/90 and being in that 10% minority made me feel like an outsider.
It came to a point that during the Q&A sessions I wouldn’t want to ask a question for fear of being labeled an idiot. Granted, I’m not familiar with the Internet Tablet line since I do not own one, I still shouldn’t have had that feeling.
Someone had an iPhone with them and when he took it out the crowd of people next to him began rolling their eyes and even booing. For what it’s worth, the iPhone is reponsible for the change (kick in the nuts) this industry needs. When I told people I use Windows they looked at me like I was a pink unicorn. Then I told them I was using Vista and not XP and I became a leper to be avoided.
I’m the sort of person that uses the best tool for the job, whether it is open source or not is irrelevant to me. This crowd was all about open. It isn’t a bad thing, not at all, but the enthusiasm I wanted to show for the platform was jaded a bit after being shunned by the very community who are attempting to leverage the Maemo platform and make it better.
One of my favorite open source projects is Firefox, created by the Mozilla Foundation. Recently they came out with something called Mozilla Labs. The goal:
“Today we’re calling on industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web.
You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to program. Everyone is welcome to participate. We’re particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open source projects. And we’re biasing towards broad participation, not finished implementations.
We’re hoping to lower the barrier to participation by providing a forum for surfacing, sharing, and collaborating on new ideas and concepts. Our goal is to bring even more people to the table and provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.”
The company is trying to push the advancement of the application, and the internet, from everyone who wants to help. The Maemo community didn’t feel like that and I’m hoping it’s something that Nokia doesn’t have to push from the top down, I would rather see the community change their attitude from the bottom up.
All of that aside, Berlin was amazing. The night life is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The venue where the Maemo Summit took place, called C-Base, is a sight to behold and some where I will visit again. The food during our lunch breaks could have been better; then again I’m spoiled by the events certain groups in Nokia host with much higher budgets. I usually don’t bother leaving an exhibition to find food at a local restaurant, but I did during the Summit
Would I go again? Yes. I learned a lot about Maemo, I learned a lot about why people like the Internet Tablet versus S60 versus other mobile platforms, I met a handful of individuals who I will keep in contact with for quite a while.
Would I recommend this event to a friend of mine? If they were a developer then yes, if not then no.
If it’s going to take place in Berlin next year then go.
What would I change for next year? Split the event into 3 days, not 2. Have one day be a Maemo Barcamp and let people talk about what they want to talk about. Have one day that is strictly geared toward developers. The last day should be about consumers with a seperate track for the developers. Three days for devs is fantastic and one day for the consumers with the option of sitting in on the technical chats should provide enough variety for everyone. More descriptions about the talks would be great, whenever an event happens and attendees are given two to three tracks to choose from it is critical that descriptions of the talks within those track be given so people know which events are relevant to them and which are not. Oh and more demos too. “Demo or die” as they say, power points only go so far.
Thank you Quim Gil for inviting me, Peter Schneider for setting everything up, the C-Base crew for some life changing conversations about the universe and most of all thank you Berlin for being one of the most kick ass cities I’ve ever been to.
As for what was announced at the Maemo Summit, check out these two articles on Ars.Technica: 1 and 2.
Cliffs: The next version of Maemo supports the OMAP 3 chip, 3,5 G (HSPA) and the graphics will be hardware accelerated.
One more thing …
Do not take this article as an insult to the open source community, Maemo and the Internet Tablet product line. I believe in their potential, but right now, for me, the N810 is still immature for my needs. I now know the community has passion, more than anything I’ve seen at a conference, I just hope it stays once the source code for Android comes out.
A lot of people complain that Android isn’t open, why hasn’t Google published the source yet, etc.? Nokia didn’t publish the source code of Maemo until the 770 shipped.