The Linux Foundation has announced MeeGo, a merger of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo projects as a single project under the leadership of the Foundation. The news came in a posting by Linux Foundation's CEO Jim Zemlin who called MeeGo "a next generation mobile operating system designed for the next generation of mobile devices".

Details of MeeGo's makeup are currently sparse, but according to Zemlin, apart from the Linux Kernel, it will include X.org, D-Bus, GStreamer and PulseAudio. It appears that the MeeGo user interface, for applications at least, will be based on Nokia's Qt framework with GTK/Clutter used for the Moblin styled operating system front end. The MeeGo developer pages direct developers to use Qt Creator to develop applications.

The MeeGo merge of Maemo and Moblin builds on previous cooperation between Nokia and Intel with the oFono project to create a low level GPLv2 licensed stack for mobile telephony. MeeGo sees both companies projects folding their entire mobile Linux efforts into one operating system as a Linux Foundation project.



MeeGo's architecture

Source: meego.com According to the MeeGo Licensing Policy, MeeGo has two major components; a GPLv2/v3 licensed operating system component and a BSD style permissively licensed MeeGo User Experience Subsystem. MeeGo contributors will not have to assign their contribution's copyright to the project and the MeeGo project says it prefers developers to contribute upstream to the projects that MeeGo draws on for its code.

Nokia says that it plans to support both MeeGo and Symbian on its mobile devices. The first devices running MeeGo are expected later this year and the first release of the operating system is expected in the second quarter of the year. Wikipedia notes that Meego was also the name of a short lived American sitcom about a 9,000 year old shape-shifting alien.

(djwm)