MeeGo team to part ways with Nokia

Open source platform developer MeeGo’s Head of Development, Sotiris Makrygiannis, recently announced that MeeGo would be parting ways with Finnish handset manufacturer Nokia. This spells the end of the open source operating system MeeGo, but thanks to the nature of open source software, it will probably be developed and expanded on by the community. With devices such as the N770, N800, N810, N900, N950 and, more recently, the N9 under their belt they have decided that it was time they parted ways with Nokia.

Bidding farewell to Nokia

The open source community was very excited when MeeGo was first announced in February 2010 by Intel and Nokia in a joint press conference. According to Intel, MeeGo was developed because Microsoft did not offer comprehensive Windows 7 support for the Atom processor. The MeeGo core operating system is a Linux distribution based on Intel’s Fedora-based Moblin and Nokia’s Debian-based Maemo. Though adored by a niche audience, MeeGo never saw much mainstream success, especially here in India where Nokia didn’t launch the N900.

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The last phone to come out of Nokia’s factories to run on MeeGo was the N9. After the release of the Windows Phone line-up, Nokia has backed off from efforts to revitalize MeeGo, focussing most of its resources instead on its new partnership with Microsoft.

Nokia fell into financial trouble even after the release of their Lumia line of phones. Analysts have attributed Nokia’s decline in large part to its late response to Apple Inc., whose iPhone redefined the smartphone market in 2007, and some see the marriage with Microsoft as possibly a last chance to turn the group around.

Earlier this year when Stephen Elop was talking about why he chose Windows Phone 7 over Android, he did not say much about MeeGo, the operating system earlier being developed in partnership with Intel. The latter might not be too surprised as they felt that Nokia was the wrong partner. While speaking at a financial analysts’ meet, Paul Otellini, CEO, Intel, said that going along with Nokia might have been the wrong step to take. Ever since Nokia dropped out of the MeeGo phone partnership, Intel has taken the design to other companies.

There is a thread set up on the Maemo forums where people can say ‘Thank you’ and wish the team well on their future endeavours.