Top Kubuntu developer Aurélien Gâteau (agateau) has been honoured with an Akademy Award for 2010. The Akademy Awards are given out each year at the annual KDE Akademy conference; the jury being formed of previous prize-winners.

Aurélien won the award for his work on Gwenview, the image viewing application which ships with Kubuntu. He was also commended at Akademy for his work in getting the KDE Status Notifier specifications adopted by the Ubuntu project, where they are known under the name Application Indicators along with necessary DBusMenu additions.

The annual Akademy conference is being held this week in Tampere in Finland, a city just fifteen kilometres from the small world-famous town called “Nokia” after which half of the worlds’ mobile phones are named. Developers and contributors at Akademy are discussing their plans to make the KDE Plasform, Plasma workspaces and Applications rock even harder. Much of the discussion is about how to integrate with Intel and Nokia’s Meego mobile system.

On receiving the award Aurélien said he was stunned and thanked his wife Gwen, who gave her name to the software he had written, before remembering to say a big “thank you to Canonical for sponsoring Akademy” and addressing more practical issues “I am only annoyed that the award frame is too large to take home in my luggage!” Anyone with a private jet who can offer assistance with transporting the enormous award is invited to contact Aurélien directly.

I’ve got plenty to tell about my experiences of our two month trip to Silicon Valley, but I’ll start with telling about the conferences and events I’ve attended. I’ll start the story with the most important and the biggest one, Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit which was held in April in San Francisco, at the Hotel Kabuki.

Unfortunately I had a flu at the same time so some of my memories of the sessions are a bit hazy, but not to worry! Before the summit we attended WhereCamp, an unconference about geoinformation, maps and everything related to that. (I’m not too much into location information, but my partner is, and I tagged along.) The organizers gave out five Flip UltraHD camcorders, and we got one! So I naturally used mine to record the sessions, which turned out to be a good thing, since the MeeGo Workshop on Thursday was not recorded by anyone else. I’m still in process of editing the video files into uploadable format – my laptop and Linux applications for video editing seem to be incompatible combination – but I promise I’ll upload the stuff soon! (Keep tuned to this channel!)

The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit was held in San Francisco on the 14th to 16th of April, 2010. Because of the flu I attended only the two first days, but that was plenty of action! Our hotel is down south at Sunnyvale so I had to find a way to travel to downtown San Francisco. I don’t have a car or drivers licence, so Caltrain was the only viable option, and that was plenty of adventure! I did plan to use the public transport in San Francisco, but it was too much for my hazy brain and I ended up using the taxi from the train station to Hotel Kabuki, where the conference was held. Being afraid of heights traveling on Caltrain was an experience, as the carriages were double-decker (see picture).

We visited Japantown on the Sunday previous to the conference so I’d know a bit about my surroundings, and it was a good decision. The hotel the conference was held is very pretty, and it’s next to a shopping centre full of Japanese shops and restaurants. It helped a lot with my navigation later!

Arriving to the venue on Wednesday we got breakfast and while eating my croissant and drinking my coffee, Elizabeth introduced me to couple of people, including Landon Jurgens from GE. I also had a little touch with fame as Bradley M. Kuhn joined our group and we talked, among other things, about Star Wars memorabilia. Geek, me?

First keynote was held by Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at The Linux Foundation, justifiably. He welcomed us, and talked about the State of the Linux Union. He told us about the reasons why Linux is so successful, but reminded us about the challenges the ecosystem faces too. As a funny sideline he showed us a video comparison of Steve Jobs describing the iPad: “wonderful, amazing, magical, easy” and beloved RMS describing GNU/Linux: free, freedom, freedoms, be a good neighbour…

I think one of the biggest reasons Linux is becoming more and more successful is the omnipresence of electrical and information technology related equipment. Even if personal computers might be running Windows or OS X or other non-Linux operating systems, there’s plenty of appliances, mobile phones, networking hardware, cars and DVR’s around.

The biggest problem with the heterogeneity of the open source community and projects – especially those who are responsible to the paradigm shift of computing infrastructure from locally owned and operated hardware/software combinations to computing as a service industry – is that there has to be extra vigilance to fit and finish what has been started and not lull into complacency with releases of half-baked services. This problem can be addressed with proper management of the project, setting targets, tasks, having testing at the heart of things and making quality assurance a top priority. [video]

Following Jim’s presentation, Daniel Frye with his IBM keynote discussed the lessons the company has learned through their decades of commitment to Linux and open source development. I found this presentation probably the most interesting of the morning sessions and enjoyed the view to the history of the IBM participation. One of the most important points that can be seen in retrospect are that it’s a lot easier to join an existing community than to create a totally new one, and that code drops are a difficult and dangerous way of participation; incremental edits for delivering change is usually better! [video]

The last presentation before lunch break was a panel about cloud computing. To my great disappointment Mark Shuttleworth wasn’t at the conference and didn’t take part in the discussion (although there were plenty of Canonical employees, including Pete Graner). I’m not a great connoisseur of cloud computing, but there were couple of points I managed to catch up: There’s vendor lock-in with the different cloud providers! I hadn’t really thought of that before, and it surprised me a bit. This makes it a bit risky business to trust your stuff to cloud services, but an idea of smaller vendors to create a standard by sharing code and infrastructure sounds mighty good to me. I’ll definitely need to add cloud computing to one of the subjects I need to read more about! [video]

After lunch Ari walked on the podium wearing a Maemo shirt to give his keynote about MeeGo, the free and standard Linux for the mobile industry. As we know, MeeGo is the result of the recent co-operation incentive of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin. There’s great hopes for this one, but I have been more or less out of touch of the real ideas behind MeeGo since I happened to be very, very sick on the week the new project was announced.

Having been watching the Maemo development from close range for quite some many years, the fact that MeeGo is aimed at not only smartphones but also TVs, tablets, car systems (and trains, planes etc) and netbooks requires some mental adjustment. MeeGo will be using Qt, Telepathy, WebKit, Fennec, RPM and GNOME, so there are some changes to Maemo. I’ve looked at the community response and the change to RPM has been the hardest to digest so far by the people.

Linux Foundation hosts the some work under MeeGo workgroup and there’s already considerable amount of collaboration going on with the platform, as Acer, Asus, BMW, Cisco, Careland, CS2C, Ericsson, DeviceVM, Gameloft, EA, Kingsoft, Linpus, Mandriva, Metasys, MontaSys, Neusoft, Novell, PixArt, Red Flag and others have already joined the MeeGo community. In the meantime first release of MeeGo has already been done in form of a code dump. It’s not really usable yet as it doesn’t have a GUI yet. N900 is the first reference device for MeeGo though, so there’s some hopes for the “older” devices :-P [slides, video]

The kernel panel was mainly uneventful. The new kernel will have better SSD support and some other new features such as a Linux equivalent of DTrace. Even if there are new features in kernel, the kernel developers keep getting older and there might not be as many new contributors to it as there has been in the past. Part of the problem is that the it’s not regarded as cool to be a kernel developer as it used to be. The code the old developers are writing into the kernel is so specialized and done by long time experts that it might be hard to understand and get used to by newer contributors. Long time contributors are well motivated and dedicated to their work on the kernel though – partly because most of them are employed to develop the kernel – so perhaps all isn’t lost after all. [video]

Imad Sousou of Intel and MeeGo technical steering group spoke after the kernel panel. He started off by mentioning his wish that since Ari had talked earlier and covered most of the topics he had in his presentation, perhaps he wouldn’t be asked the hard questions since Ari had already answered them. (This wish the audience later broke, by asking hard questions about proprietary blobs Maemo has had in the past. Ari answered them as diplomatically as possible, telling that while the project itself aims to be 100% open source, there might be proprietary components, such as device drivers, Skype etc. distributed by the vendors of the devices. Nokia will be one of the vendors, so, there will be proprietary components in the devices Nokia ships. This didn’t come as a surprise to me.)

What Imad stressed in his talk is that MeeGo plans to work very closely to the upstream.

If you want a kernel patch into MeeGo, send it to kernel upstream instead of MeeGo. If you want a Qt patch into MeeGo, send it to Qt.

MeeGo will also have a six month release cycle. First one is going to be released really soon (hopefully) as the schedule is aiming to release every May and November. [slides, video]

Why Your Life Might Depend on Your Code from the DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung (that’s the German Air Traffic Control) was mind-boggling. I’ve not watched the video yet, but I know it includes the video they showed us, and instead of yapping about too much about what the presentation was about, I suggest that you watch the video of the presentation. I can’t make justice to it by trying to condensate the points. [slides, video]

The presentation about how to prevent communities and co-operation was hilarious. Josh Berkus engaged the audience with his Over The Wall presentation. He had condensed how to stop global warming in a few easy steps that make sure you’ve built a wall between your developers and the community and stop contributions. The first premise you need to apply to the rest is that your developers do not take part in the community and all the releases are done in code drops, as thrown over the wall.

Ingredients include: difficult tools, preferably proprietary, homegrown, outdated or non-gui stuff, going all the way from CVS to CMS, via buildsystems and bugtrackers. The team needs to be overworked, and you need to make sure it’s kept that way: otherwise they’ll be babbling with the community! To make sure no communication happens, meetings need to be closed too – teleconferences make things hard, but make stuff impossible by having closed meetings. If you have a means of communication, obscure it as much as you can, and feed the trolls to make the community work against itself. Leave everything to be managed by one person, one person for webpages, mailing lists, etc. Use legalese everywhere where possible, but if you really want to tick people off, just be silent. [slides, video]

Chris diBona used Josh’s slides backwards to tell how Google does Open Source. Basically everything is in reverse! But in the end, Chris started using his own slides. Mootpoint was, that Google has released so far 915 projects as open source, and that more than 200 Google employees are patching and contributing to upstream projects. The message that also was included was that looking for enemies within the Linux and open source community isn’t beneficial. For Android to succeed MeeGo doesn’t have to fail, and indeed, in Android there’s plenty of stuff that has been originally contributed by Nokia employees. At the end of his presentation Chris won over the hearts and souls of the audience by giving every attendee a free Nexus One! [slides, video]

The first day of the event was brilliant, and we moved to a Japanese restaurant to an afterparty. I was getting tired after waking up at five o’clock and left the party around eight o’clock, to recuperate from the day to be ready for the next day. That’s up in my next blog post, coming up soon on this same bat channel! If you want to read a more accurate description of both the first and second day of Linux Collaboration Summit 2010, I highly recommend reading this Qaiku thread, written by Henri Bergius.

The second day of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit started with breakfast and scoping out the possible talks to attend to. Many of the talks looked interesting, but I wandered to the MeeGo workgroup room according to my original plan and set up my Flipcam to record the sessions (the cheap mock Gorillapod proved to be worth the money several times over this day!).

First of all Dawn Foster, the MeeGo co-Community Manager from Intel (Quim Gil of Nokia being the other) introduced herself and asked us to introduce ourselves too, with three words. That proved to be a funny experience and it was even funnier looking at my attempted recording of the introductory round (though I succeeded in pointing the camera at the right person with surprisingly high percentage!). There were plenty of Nokians, Intelians (though I had to wonder how many of them know Walter) and even a person from Adobe developing Flash. Of course Bergie was there too, after all, he was the first person I met on previous day, Wednesday arriving to the venue. Ericsson had people attending the workgroup, as did Igalia and Collabora, and, of course, Canonical as well. In my hazy (feverish) state I forgot to discuss with Robert McQueen of Collabora more, it would have been fun to discuss the state of affairs of Linux, open source and Maemo in Cambridgeshire area.

After the roll-call Arjan Van de Ven, Senior Staff Engineer of Intel gave us an overview on the technical aspects of MeeGo. MeeGo is a personal OS for personal devices, and as Imad mentioned the day before, MeeGo plans to integrate upstream projects to be released every six months to nice bundles that manufacturers can use as a basis for the software stacks of their products. The grand plan is to make MeeGo a standard that can be used with standard Linux applications with least effort of porting effort, and Nokia will make efforts in synchronizing MeeGo with Qt releases.

Qt and C++ will be the languages of choice for development for MeeGo. Compliance testing may assume the applications are done on Qt. Judging from this, GTK will be phased out from the stack, which I think is a shame. Python can be used for programming too with Pyside, but it might not be available on every platform MeeGo will be released on. Browser hasn’t been decided on yet, it could be Fennec or Chromium, as it’s just an application. Webkit will be offered as the embeddable HTML viewer.

On the hardware side both ARM and Intel will be supported:

We as MeeGo don’t want to have one-time hardware-specific forks like Android has had.

Hardware patches, as other patches, should be submitted upstream because of this policy. Only devices that agree on the rules set by MeeGo can use the MeeGo logo and trademark: Devices need to ship with the full MeeGo stack and the application-level API must not be broken, so patches should be applied to the stack. There are plans for MeeGo application store as with Maemo has the community repositories, but proprietary stuff will be centralised either on Ovi Store or manufacturer-specific stores. There might be restrictions imposed to what can be installed to the devices by the manufacturers and the operators. [slides]

Next Greg Kroah-Hartman from Novell told us about the netbook UI. There was some video from Beijing that apparently presented the leaked UI. Novell is contributing to the Netbook quite a lot, so there’s a lot of Novell stuff going to the Netbook version: Banshee, Evolution, MobileMe, Tracker. As such, C# is included with the Netbook version and that can be used for development as well. The browser is going to be Chrome, and the aim is to have similar power/battery usage as Windows XP.

Decision making is important in every project. Quim told us about it in his presentation after lunch (Mexican menu in a Japanese restaurant was somewhat… disturbing is the best way to describe it) – by scribbling on the flip board (checking the notes from his N900 now and then). In hindsight someone should’ve taken pictures of all the scribblies Quim drew, but oh well… The basic idea of the decision-making is that there’ll be working groups for specific areas of development that make the big decisions – such as for handheld UX, netbook UX etc – but that for most of the stuff, it will decided as on every other distro out there.

Marcel Holtmann of Intel continued by offering us an overview of the connectivity framework used in MeeGo. It is built mainly on oFono, connman and Bluez with tight interaction: similar user interfaces and functionality overlap in the projects. connman controls all the radio on the device, it handles setting the device to flight mode, and on the todo list for it are for example statistics and counter interfaces, portal and location detection (I really wish this would come to Linux in general, hotel wifi authentication http catchalls are such a pain!) Wimax is a whole separate stack, controlled by connman, but LTE will be controlled by oFono. Currently there is nobody doing the mmsd and there is no open source mmsd implementation. VPN implementation isn’t ready yet, so far it supports Cisco VPN’s but OpenVPN support is coming up soon, too (WOHOO!). [slides]

Later, we were given a treat of hearing a presentation of Qt Quick (QML) by Henrik Hartz, Qt Product Manager. The UI is defined with a combination of “CSS” (even I, a non-coder understood some of that part) and JavaScript, and all the hard byte crunching happens underneath the bonnet with the logic done with C++. To me that sounds like a brilliant idea that allows the design of the UI and the actual programmatic logic be separated better, giving both aspects a fair amount of focus instead of concentrating only to the non-UI parts.

The last officially formed session was the MeeGo Technical panel with Sakari Poussa, Dawn Foster, Arjan Van de Ven and Andy Wilson. It shed some light on why MeeGo was formed: the goals and perceived methods to achieve them were considered so similar be the two companies that they figured the benefits of combining the efforts would outweigh the bad, but of course some negotiations were needed to make the most important platform decisions.

The panelists didn’t think working groups would cause a lot of decision making overhead as they are not meant to micromanage everything. Most decisions should be done by upstream developers on mailing lists, bug reports and team meetings in any case.

Although future MeeGo devices willh have the possibility for the operators to lock the phones to their network, Quim did reminds the audience that if a Nokia device is bought directly from Nokia store or online shop, there will be Methos of unlocking it, if it’s not outright unlocked by default.

Finally we had a quite uninformal discussion about translations for MeeGo, led by Intel’s Margie Foster. The discussion was about the translation tool, Transifex, quality control, best practices and teams.

I’ve got some experience on translating software to my native language, Finnish. At one point I was an active member of the translation community of Finland due to personal interest and my job. My line manager at Nomovok, Timo Jyrinki is the team leader of the Finnish translations in Ubuntu and GNOME, and during my more active years in the Finnish translation community some of the knowledge rubbed on me too.

Out of interest I found my way to MeeGo’s current translations and checked out the Finnish translations. Some of the translations were in an abysmally bad they literally made my eyes water. I was horrified when I was told that someone had been paid to do those translations (getting paid for translating open source stuff is good, doing a bad job at it is not). I couldn’t keep my mouth shut but asked what kind of quality control is there for the translations, and how is MeeGo as a project going to make sure that translations pulled from upstream aren’t written over or edited to be worse than they originally were – since I know cases of this happening too. The best way I know to make sure the quality of the translations are consistent is to make the amount of contributors consistent and big enough. If you have done translations for Ubuntu, perhaps you could have a look at doing translations for MeeGo as well?

The evening party was organized by MeeGo and it consisted of drinks and tapas at Dosa on Filmore/Post. I had lengthy discussions with Ryan Abel, Randall Arnold, Quim Gil and Ronan MacLaverty, and couple of other people whose names I’ve probably managed to forget.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about Palm, WebOS, the palm pre and android. There are a few ideas about whether Palm could go bust in the near future, and I thought I would pop in my opinions.

The one thing we can all agree on, I think, is that Palm were a hugely innovating company. They made the pda. Name a pda…any pda at all. Was it a palm? Well, if it wasn’t you are just being difficult. I had a Palm T|X, and I am only 19. Seriously, they are the pda company. It was even changed to name after them. Palmtops. Most people call them that rather than PDAs. Whether or not you liked palms, you have to admit they made it in that era.

Ok, so now that we have agreed on that, this is where we get to the interesting things. Most people say that Palm should get rid of WebOS and adopt android. There was a rumour about Palm doing this, but they have since refuted it. So, either that isn’t happening, or they haven’t decided whether they want to do this or not. But that doesn’t mean that this is a bad idea.

In my opinion, I think this is a bad idea. Palm should not, and I think they won’t switch to android. It is not good at all. It means that essentially we are back to iphone, winmo and android (yeah, I didn’t include maemo or symbian because symbian will be dead soon and maemo is nowhere near ready for normal user use. So, if Palm drop WebOS, we will be back a step on the way to diversity in the mobile market. The more Mobile OS we have, the better.

What I think Palm should do, is completely open WebOS, and do an android on it. Allow other companies to use it, put it on their phones, and develop everything around it. I think this would be good for Palm, good for the market, and ironically good for android. It would put huge publicity towards palm, allow so many more people to use it, so more developers will make apps, which means that people will start buying Palm Pres.