An update on the proprietary Maemo SDK installer

Yesterday I wrote about my dissatisfaction with the current state of the Android 2.0 code tree and how a proprietary install script for Maemo scared me off.

As suggested in one of the comments to my post I filed a bug report against Maemo, bug 6087.

Besides getting quite a few replies to the bug report within a matter of hours Carsten Munk pointed me at Maemo SDK+, which has less restrictive licensing.

Another comment, by Marius Gedminas (thanks!) pointed me at Mer,

a new operating system for small, mobile touch-screen devices.

It is Linux based and layers the best open-source elements of Nokia's Maemo platform over a modern Ubuntu base.

The goals of Mer include:

• Integrate the best solutions for a wide variety of small form-factor devices
• Encourage wider access to device capabilities through the Vendor Social Contract
• Demonstrably provide an easy route to market for vendors
• Dramatically reduce costs to vendors of supporting EOL hardware
• Focus, harness and support community contributions to the platform
• Encourage and ease migration of existing applications
• Support experimentation, innovation and development