Valtteri Halla, the Nokia member of the MeeGo Technical Steering Group recently attempted to allay the concerns of the open source community by underscoring the importance of openness in the development of the MeeGo operating system.

In a blog post last week, the veteran Nokia executive who has been working to get Linux onto Nokia phones since 2000, announced that the MeeGo repository will be opened by the end of this month. The source and binary repo will provide a raw baseline for building MeeGo on the Nokia N900 and Intel Atom-based netbooks.

What’s more interesting is the flurry of debate surrounding the details – or lack thereof – related to the processes that will enable the open source development model to flourish around the MeeGo platform. So far, Halla has said little about the decisions made by the technical steering group to choose RPM rather than deb as the package manager for MeeGo:

While code is certainly the most important question, the most frequently asked, however, has been about technology selections. The big ticket items like Qt, OBS and RPM were already communicated at the launch and as we expected, kicked off a few small avalanches of debate! These selections were, of course, pre-agreed and I can assure you that the amount of effort spent in resolving these was not small. After all, these are the points driving most of the investment cost and transition pains for Nokia, Intel and the Moblin and Maemo communities. Further selections are mostly still under discussion and beyond a few obvious ones (X, connman, ofono, gstreamer, dbus,…) can be considered as working assumptions for MeeGo 1 release. Now that the internal responsibilities within Intel and Nokia are becoming clear I expect that the people behind these selections and assumptions will start appearing in meego.com pages, mailing lists and wikis during the coming days.

This has generated some concerns that developers are being left out of the conversation, thus increasing their skepticism of the purported “openness” of the MeeGo platform. To be fair, it was necessary for the steering group to make some hard decisions at the beginning of a big open source initiative that merges two existing platforms. Otherwise, we could argue till the cows come home and nothing will move.

But what is the process that governs these decisions? Are we talking about a process similar to JCP (Java Community Process), where there are clearly defined procedures for the development and revision of the Java’s technology specifications?

Other tough questions that need to be addressed: driver support from hardware and device manufacturers, DRM support that is compatible with operators’ content business and application support for potentially different variants of MeeGo that could emerge. The technical steering group should address these issues early on if it wants to seed a rich developer ecosystem that is crucial for the success of any mobile platform.

I wrote a piece for the Sunday Times published today about the emergence of the smartbooks – netbooks which use mobile processors and Linux/Google operating systems instead of the usual Wintel duopoly. I drafted the specs from the info provided and e-mailed it back to the computer company for them to confirm the specs. Everything was in order, except the OS part which the PR wanted me to
“pls state OS to be ‘comprising of a customer user interface layer, built on a custom Linux-based OS.”

In other words, a Linux OS. “That’s rubbish” was my response and I simply told him/her that the sentence was a total waste of valuable space on the newspaper. He/she said he/she did not understand why I used the word rubbish and went on to send me more info:

Q. What is the OS for Skylight and why did you choose it?
A. The Skylight User experience is comprised of a custom UI layer built on a custom Linux base OS.   The average user will not be aware that the OS is based on Linux.  We chose this approach because it provided the flexibility to deliver a simple, discoverable, and fun gadget based way of presenting web applications and media.

Q: Is this a Lenovo Operating System?

A: That depends on your definition of “Operating System”.   We have created a unique software stack optimized to achieve a specific user experience focused on web applications, media and cloud computing.    The focus of our investments have been on the User Interface layer.

Q: What did you base the OS on?

A: Lenovo’s Skylight Interface runs on Embedded Linux.  ThunderSoft is Lenovo’s Linux System Integrator.

Q: Are you working with a Linux distribution partner? Who is it?
A: Yes Thundersoft.  Lenovo recognized the value of running Linux as a base platform for the Skylight User Interface for everything from performance to extensive customization.   This allowed us to pick the best and most appropriate elements to solve the SmartBook equation.   An extensive team of partners along with internal development teams from Lenovo and Qualcomm worked together to pick, customize and create what we needed to provide a world-class solution.

Yes my friend. It is still a Linux OS.

The anti-virus (AV) market is increasingly getting to be a difficult business for market incumbents.

The top players in this space — notably Symantec’s Norton and McAffee, followed by Trend Micro — have seen their market shares taken on by a slew of smaller competitors in the market, including Kaspersky Labs, ESET, Panda, AVAST and AVG, amongst others.

What’s more interesting is that some of these AV solutions from these smaller firms are good, and might even be better than the incumbents, if you can believe the latest anti-virus comparisons released by Anti-Malware Test Labs just about a week ago. Anti-Malware Test Labs is a Russian independent security research firm that is not affiliated to any software vendor, and has shared AV comparison tests with the public since 2007.

According to them, both DrWeb and Kaspersky, both Russia-based AV solutions, topped the list of the 17 AV software vendors. More than half the vendors flunked the comparison test as they didn’t defend against enough virus attacks in the testing.

Linux users are often at the mercy of hardware vendors when it comes to device drivers. The open source community often needs to turn to reverse engineering to churn out drivers from proprietary ones. As long as the majority of hardware is made for Windows and OS X machines, Linux users will need to wait until the community figures out the nuts and the bolts of a piece of hardware before a Linux driver can be written.

Take Nouveau for example. The open source project started in 2006 with the aim of building high quality drivers for Nvidia graphics cards. Although Nvidia provided a Linux driver several years ago, it was a basic driver with no 3D support. The Nouveau project gained momentum and a year later, its driver soon outperformed Nvidia’s in 2D performance.

While some Linux drivers can be as good as proprietary ones from hardware vendors, others only allow basic functionality with sometimes abysmal performance. My interest in Linux was rekindled recently when I installed Ubuntu 9.10 on my three-year-old Macbook. The basic hardware like the keyboard and graphics worked right out of the box after the installation, with the exception of the iSight webcam which only worked after I installed a software that reverse engineered the right driver out of Apple’s proprietary iSight driver.

Driven by commercial interest through a stranglehold over the unique features of its hardware, it is not in Apple’s interest or any hardware vendor to release open source drivers. A recent feature in Linux Magazine on the Nouveau project pointed out that Nvidia “still gains far too much advantage by keeping their driver closed. They get support for brand new models, extra performance, better power management, extra features like VDPAU, and certain technology components can remain a company secret”.

Meanwhile, Linux users have to continue tinkering with their boxes to make things work, but with the support of the community through hundreds of thousands of forums and interest groups on almost every Linux distro, there’s bound to be a workaround out there. But hey, it’s also what makes computing fun isn’t it?

There has always been rivalry in the tech industry, but it’s not that common when a tech giant chooses to name and launch a direct assault on an opponent.

Take a look at the following YouTube video, which was just put up yesterday by Microsoft on YouTube, on why their solutions are better than Google’s cloud ones. Basically it charges that Google only has cloud-based solutions, whilst Microsoft has a mix of on-prem and cloud solutions that fit its customers better.

My comment is that the world is migrating towards cloud-based solutions (with some caveats as kinks are being worked out), so vendors either evolve or be rendered obsolete. And with Google in the driver’s seat on this, it can’t be fun for others having to play catch up.

The Internet has been abuzz with Google’s announcement of Buzz, their new social networking platform that they just announced about a day ago.

Of course, Facebook is the king of the hill in the social networking space that Google is going after.

Reams of commentaries and news analysis has been written about this — here are some excellent ones by PC Mag and TechCrunch — so I’m not going to delve into the history and just go straight to the point with my comments.

With Buzz bundled in Gmail natively, my gut feel is that it has a good chance of taking off, especially with the huge Gmail install base. Went to the Buzz website to find out more, but apparently it’s not available for Singapore yet.

Here’s their statement on the site:

We’re still rolling out Buzz to everyone, so if you don’t see it in your Gmail account yet, check back soon.

*Update*: It’s now up for me. That was fast!

That’s about it for the newspoint. The story I really want to write, however, is how Google has been taking over all the tools I’ve been using.

A must-read for everyone.

Written by an ex-MS employee, this guy shares why Microsoft has become what he calls a “clumsy innovator” and why non of the “wow” gadgets coming out these last few years – Kindle, iPhone, Android, Facebook – is from the computing giant.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html?pagewanted=1

NETS, the Singapore electronic payment vendor, just launched their iNETS mobile service, in which you can pay your bills via your mobile phone in Singapore.

The story was covered by quite a few of the main papers in Singapore, like the Straits Times, Today, and My Paper, as this story broke yesterday.

What struck me when I read the story in the Straits Times is that the iNETS mobile payment platform supports “all mobile phones save the iPhone and the Android platform”.

When I read this, I almost fell out of my chair thinking: Errr, aren’t these some of the more popular platforms? And Android phones will definitely be set to grow in the market this year, with the Google Nexus One, Samsung Galaxy Spica, and Motorola Dext already out since February with more to come.

Scenic sightseeing tours – not tanks making minced meat out of hapless civilians – are the results you will find if you do an online search for “Tiananmen Square” or “Tibet” while in China.

Propaganda, not reality, is what you get when looking for information behind the Great Firewall of China, so goes the Western view of China’s Internet censorship regime.

Thus, Google’s threat today to pull out of China altogether and to provide a search that is unfettered by the communist government’s censorship regime, has been greeted by some Western commentators as a good thing for freedom of speech in the awakening giant.

Question is: are things that simple? Dig deeper and you will find that this story of Google versus China has a lot more questions than answers.

Google Street View Singapore at construction of ION Orchard

Tiny Singapore finally joins the ranks of countries with Street View today, right on the heels of the roll out in Hawaii and large parts of Spain in November.

This also makes Singapore the third Asian country after Japan and Taiwan (Taipei city only) to be mapped in 3D by the Mountain View firm.