An interesting day on the MeeGo front today. As the endless discussion on IRC about why rpm was chosen repeated itself throughout the day, it became increasingly clear to me what was happening.

Nokia, in my opinion, have decided to abandon the Maemo platform and move their application stack over to Moblin. This was obviously bound to cause uproar in the maemo community. So in my opinion the MeeGo project and the portrayal as a merger is a PR stunt to try and save Nokia some face. They’re more interested in the application stack that sits on top with their Qt frameworks and Ovi product line. This is where they see their value. Add to this the fact that it’s likely Nokia will be one of the first Atom licensees at the TSMC facility and it’s clear that they needed a platform to broaden this horizon. It’s likely that this “merger” has been in the works for a long long time.

So, I feel happy that Moblin isn’t really going anywhere, it’s just changed it’s name and will have some appropriately themed Qt applications from Maemo 6 included in the next release. All good in my opinion, but if I was a Maemo fan, I’d be pretty upset.

It’s also clear that, even though already pointless, this topic of discussion on IRC and the mailing list about “Why rpm was chosen and not deb” is being naive. It’s not that rpm was chosen over deb, it’s that deb packages and the whole platform associated with it where dropped in favor for Moblin.

I’ve been meaning to brush up on my C++ for a while, so perhaps having Qt as a prominent  platform on Moblin MeeGo will do me some good.