Back in February, technology giants Intel and Nokia announced they were combining their respective Maemo and Moblin Linux-based platform efforts into a new entity called MeeGo. MeeGo would be running Intel's Moblin under-the-hood components, but relying on Nokia's Maemo user interface framework and Qt development environment for interface and presentation. And now, the effort is bearing its first fruit: MeeGo has opened its source code repositories to developers, giving folks a first crack at its forthcoming mobile operating system.
"Today is the culmination of a huge effort by the worldwide Nokia and Intel teams to share the MeeGo operating system code with the open source community," wrote Imad Sousou on the Meego site. "This is the latest step in the full merger of Maemo and Moblin, and we are happy to open the repositories and move the ongoing development work into the open-as we set out to do from the beginning."
The MeeGo platform is still far from complete-right now it just drops users into a command-line environment, and does not include an application interface layer, which means there's essentially no way an everyday user could do anything with the operating system. However, images are available for Intel Atom-based notebooks, Atom-based handsets, and Nokia's ARM-based N900 mobile Internet device. The idea behind the preliminary release is to let developers in on the initial stages of the MeeGo platform, even before devices designed to the platform become available. Programmers will be able to participate in MeeGo development from very early stages: MeeGo code will all be in public repositories-it's transparency that's very uncommon in mobile device development.
Intel and Nokia anticipate the first release of MeeGo will be available in May, with the first MeeGo devices following later this year.
