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Open development

Revision as of 11:04, 2 February 2010

The basics

Maemo is developed as an open collaboration between Nokia and many generous volunteer programmers, designers, and users. Most of Maemo's components are open source, which gives users and developers the freedom and flexibility to contribute to and modify the platform's core development. Read the Introduction to open source at maemo.nokia.com.

Open development is the goal and open source is a consequence of it. Easier said than done when you need to deliver commercial and competitive products on time, but the Maemo team is trying and improving on every release.

Open Source and open development strategy

• Maemo 5 software architecture indicating open/closed components.
• How Maemo approaches open source explains the basics.
• Taking open source forward explains Maemo's willingness to collaborate in the platform while differentiating in the user experience.
• Upstream projects providing software integrated in Maemo releases.
• Maemo contributions is an attempt to list the most relevant contributions to OSS upstream projects.
• Task:Components and packages contains statistics about packages open/closed in Maemo 4.1. A Maemo 5 update will come after the final release.
• Open development/Why the closed packages elaborates the reasons to have certain packages closed and addresses requests for opening components.
• Task:Busybox describes the strategy for moving towards open development of Busybox.
• Task:osso-xterm - opening the development of osso-xterm

See also the Fremantle and Harmattan roadmaps.

And this blog post: Software freedom lovers: here comes Maemo 5

In practice

• If you want to get involved you need to find first the most recent source code available.
  • The source code of OSS components shipped in Maemo releases can be found at http://repository.maemo.org/pool/ e.g. Maemo 5.
  • The current development of certain components can be found at http://maemo.gitorious.org . See the list of projects above for more details.
• If you have patches for upstream components it is better to submit them directly upstream, unless they are indeed specific to Maemo.
• Check the Maemo contribution guidelines before contributing any code.
• Patches with bugfixes are submitted through http://bugs.maemo.org with the corresponding bug report.
• Contact the developers before working on major patches or new features!

Projects developed openly

• Many components integrated in Maemo have Nokia developers or collaborators working directly upstream:
  • Linux kernel - OMAP list.
  • BlueZ
  • GTK+
  • Mozilla
  • Meta Tracker
  • Ohm
  • Telepathy
  • Upstart
  • ConnMan
  • oFono
• http://maemo.gitorious.org is the default host for official Maemo specific open development, but there is more.
• Some projects have still their code repository in http://garage.maemo.org
  • BusyBox
  • dsme
  • osso-xterm
• Developer tools:
  • gst-dsp aims to provide GStreamer elements to take advantage of those algorithms. The list includes video/image decoders and encoders. See also the Maemo repository

Community projects developed openly

There are dozens of community projects developed openly. Learn more about them at (this should link to another page to keep this one around Nokia projects).