This here is the new Nokia N900 phone, running Maemo5, a Linux distribution. Wow!
http://thenokiablog.com/2009/08/27/nokia-n900/
http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/
(the downside is the ~high price and there’re chances that some bits of it are still closed)
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What bits are still closed?
Hmm.. now that I did some more research I must admit I don’t know, and that there’s a slight possibility that it’s open. 3G-chip, graphic accelerator and GSM are something that have high changes of being closed so.. we’ll just have to wait & see…
Okies! Thanks for letting me know; I’m excited about this too. ^.^
The gsm and 3g are likely on the same chip, and so it may simply use the proper standard AT commands, like any usb 3g key ( with slights variations of the standard implementation, of course ). Since nokia funded the developpement of ofono and connman, this part will be free.
As usual, I guess the firmware running on the chip will be closed, under the form of a binary blob, which is simply a real time os, like nucleos running on a arm cpu with proper pin and radio device, and a proprietary gsm and 3g stack.
I would be more concerned about the graphic accelerator, and wifi adapter.
The PowerVR driver will almost certainly have a proprietary driver, at least at first. I don’t know if they picked an open wifi chip this time around. A few other low-level userspace components that act as drivers will probably not become open right away. They’ll also throw in Flash, Skype, and various other proprietary userspace bits, most of which you can easily remove.
Nevertheless, this still represents a far more open phone than any of the Android phones, the Palm Pre, or the iPhone. The OpenMoko certainly wins on openness, and I look forward to using the first device they have that provides a working phone out of the box. In the meantime, I’ll gladly replace my old all-proprietary phone with this, and push for more openness in the future.
It would be nice if their website mentioned Maemo is a Debian based distro (like Ubuntu now does, FSVO of does). It would also be nice if it ran pure Debian instead of a derivative distro (would be nice if Ubuntu merged once and for all into Debian too).
There is a list of the closed parts on the Maemo.org site http://wiki.maemo.org/Why_the_closed_packages with lame justifications for them. I understand that they can’t open the GSM/3G stack as it wouldn’t get approved by government bodies but a lot of it is arguments about consistency and maintaining their edge over the competition which are IMHO bull.
Having said all that they are at least making noises about opening more of it up and they have demonstrated some willingness in this direction eg. LGPLing QTopia.
If Openmoko can produce a new handset with similar specs I’d rather have that but I think Nokia moving to a fully open OS is more likely at this stage.
@All: thanks for your comments!!
@kombipom: thanks for the link!
Checking the supported video & audio formats:
* Video recording file format: .mp4; codec: MPEG-4
* Video playback file formats: .mp4, .avi, .wmv, .3gp; codecs: H.264, MPEG-4, Xvid, WMV, H.263
* Music playback file formats: .wav, .mp3, .AAC, .eAAC, .wma, .m4a
* Ring tones: .wav, .mp3, .AAC, .eAAC, .wma, .m4a
Where’s Theora/Vorbis – gstreamer supports it but I heard somewhere that Nokia believes it’s proprietary and won’t support.
“Alarm framework is open source, but apparently the sources are lost/missing as explained in the bug. ” – heh :)
It isn’t expensive compared to the competition, I think it works out cheaper than the iphone.
“open source”, with the source code lost, is a wonderful new category!
@foo: They do show the Debian logo on http://maemo.nokia.com/maemo/! Along with Mozilla’s, GNOME’s, GStreamer’s, and a freaky inverted-color version of Tux the Penguin. ^.^ Scroll down to see it!
I know, not as good as acknowledging Debian in the marketing text somewhere, like they do for Mozilla in several places. I guess Mozilla’s more of a consumer-facing brand name already, and they feel they can get away with that.
@kombipom: Thanks for the link too! I agree, keeping things closed to maintain “competitive advantage” is pretty lame; that’s sort of why I left Ubuntu (*cough*UbuntuOne*cough*). This isn’t an ostensibly Free Software company all of a sudden tieing proprietary online bits into their OS with no explanation, though, this is a major international corporation releasing a handset that’s like 90% F/OSS-powered. And that page says there’s work on opening more of it up!
We need to get people to work doing things to fully open the stack. That includes spreading the word about Maemo, and getting developers active in their community so that there are more voices to petition for things to be opened up (which they actually asked us to do). OpenMoko was a great idea, but I can’t help but think that there’s more intertia behind Maemo at this point, so it may be better / easier to just write free replacements for the proprietary Maemo bits than to try to bring OpenMoko up to a point where it can compete.
*imagines a downloadable app that instantly swaps out free replacements for the proprietary UI / other bits*
@Risto H. Kurppa: That does seem like a glaring oversight! Maybe it supports Ogg and they decided not to mention this? Ah well, we can just add the support ourselves, right?
@matt: Maybe if you don’t buy a data plan!
Native ogg support:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/09/nokia-to-w3c-ogg-is.html
-> If Nokia supports Open Source, why to work on removing support for open standards?
@Jared: The problem is it’s not just “proprietary UI / other bits”.
There are several key components in the base system which are proprietary – components that enable the device to charge its battery or talk to some sort of hardware watchdog to prevent the thing from rebooting constantly. Look for dsme, bme, mce over at http://wiki.maemo.org/Why_the_closed_packages.
The other problematic area is hardware drivers. The N770/N800/N810 have shipped with binary only wifi drivers. There is little to no public documentation available for the respective wifi chips. There’s an open source driver for the wifi chip in the N800/N810 over at http://stlc45xx.garage.maemo.org/. Last I checked it was incomplete. I’m not sure about its current state.
It’s not yet clear what the exact situation will be with the N900. I’m hoping Nokia will at least provide kernel drivers with source code. Like Anonymous above, I have little hope for an open source X driver though.
When Quim Gil joined Nokia and asked for participation in the process of opening up proprietary bits in Maemo I was very positive about it. Today it seems more like that was a publicity stunt to silence criticism – in the sense of an equivalent to the “patches welcome” response often seen on open source mailing lists. You know you won’t get any patches from mere users but suddenly you’ve got a great excuse not to fix a certain problem. The fact that https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1584 was closed as FIXED without an actual resolution is a clear slap in the face of those in the community who did try to participate.
Now, if you follow the comments over at http://flors.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/software-freedom-lovers-here-comes-maemo-5/ you’ll notice that fundamental changes on Nokia’s end aren’t going to happen with the N900.
There is also another dimension to this: https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3373 indicates that Nokia may be in violation of the (L)GPL and basically doesn’t care.
As for a community effort to provide replacements for the closed parts in Maemo, I’d say it might be possible for parts of dsme, bme, mce (if those are still going to be present on the N900) but it’s effectively impossible for non-trivial hardware drivers. This has been tried before with other devices and the bottom line is: By the time you’ve got anything that even remotely works the device has long reached end of life (12-20 months for the N900 I’d presume).
As for spreading the word about Maemo, I think that’s exactly the opposite of what anyone interested in openness should be doing. You’d be rewarding Nokia for doing a really poor job here. Spreading the word about Nokia not following through on their “Software Freedom Lovers” promises might be a better course of action.
the things i would buy an openmoko for are:
* usb host functionality (e.g. to connect normal keyboard)
* software installation/update via repositories
* experimentation with alternative text-input methods via touch screen
* running emacs :-)
do you think these things would be possible at this stage of Maemo openness?
thanks,
maarten
sorry for being unclear, i mean:
do you think these things would be possible with Maemo/N900 as it looks now?
@maarten: I don’t know for sure but to me it looks like that repositores (as it’s based on debian), alternative text-input and emacs (you’re free to port any app you want) should be no problem, USB host – no idea.
USB host would be awesome! Then you could plug in a compact keyboard and use TV-out and have your own portable desktop. ^.^
I know the GP2X can do things like that, but it doesn’t look nearly as versatile or well-supported as the N900! And the iPhone has TV-out, which is one reason my dad got it, but no USB port … or any way to use an external keyboard with it, really. Plus, it’s the iPhone …
Hey, take a look at this: http://monkeyiq.blogspot.com/2009/09/n810-and-gphoto.html
This guy was testing out plugging his camera into an earlier model to transfer photos from it! Apparently it didn’t work for him, but I think that confirms that there’s some kind of USB functionality. And the libraries used to transfer photos don’t work, but maybe some others do?
N810 can be used usb host. Additionally it needs some adapter to attach something. I have use memory sticks and usb-joystick (it needs kernel module).
@Michael:
There should be no need to worry about the Wifi driver:
http://osdir.com/ml/linux-wireless/2009-08/msg01283.html
The GSM modem should be accesable through the open source PhoNet driver that is in the mainline kernel:
Aug 31 07:32:56 akiniemi: we all assumed that one of the reasons for bootsting oFono work is the upcoming device from Nokia…
Aug 31 07:33:24 akiniemi: what will it use for telephony then?
Aug 31 07:36:37 PaulFertser: proprietary stack, built on top of PhoNet
Aug 31 07:37:04 But oFono is what we’re expecting to use in the future. We just haven’t been able to say it aloud. ;)
(from http://logs.nslu2-linux.org/livelogs/ofono.txt)