The industry behind MeeGo
Intel and Nokia jointly funded MeeGo from February 2010, Intel to give its Atom processors a credible mobile operating system and Nokia to carry its Linux work past Symbian, and neither motive ever put Intel silicon inside a Nokia phone: both the N900 and the N9 ran Texas Instruments OMAP processors.
Who was paying for MeeGo
Paying for MeeGo were two companies with opposite problems and one shared conclusion. Nokia had a mobile Linux platform and no volume; Intel had volume in computing and no mobile platform. Each concluded that the cost of building a phone operating system alone was higher than the cost of sharing one, and in February 2010 they merged Maemo and Moblin into MeeGo under the Linux Foundation. Hosting it at the foundation rather than at either company was the price of the other side agreeing to it.
| Party | Brought to MeeGo | Wanted from it |
|---|---|---|
| Nokia | Maemo, Qt, handset engineering, shipping hardware | An ecosystem and a platform above Symbian |
| Intel | Moblin, x86 optimisation, the Atom roadmap | Software that made Atom viable in phones and tablets |
| Linux Foundation | Neutral governance and hosting | A credible open mobile platform not owned by one vendor |
Neither company has published what it spent on the effort, and any figure quoted for the cost of MeeGo is an estimate rather than a reported number.
Nokia’s motive: a route past Symbian
Nokia’s motive was a route past Symbian, which by 2010 was selling in enormous quantity while losing developers at speed. Symbian had been open sourced through the Symbian Foundation, but its programming model was its own and the tooling was unlike anything a Linux or desktop developer already knew. Maemo was Nokia’s hedge against that: a Debian-based system with a real package manager, running on the 770, the N800, the N810 and then on a phone.
The problem with the hedge was scale. The Nokia N900 was a single device with a developer following rather than a mass market, and one device does not create an ecosystem. Qt was the intended bridge, letting one codebase target Symbian and Maemo and then MeeGo, and it is the single piece of the strategy that outlasted the strategy. Nokia’s own commitment ended in February 2011, when it named Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform.
Intel’s motive: an operating system for Atom
Intel’s motive was an operating system for Atom, its low-power x86 line, in markets where nobody was writing x86 software. Intel had started Moblin in 2007 for netbooks and mobile internet devices and had handed it to the Linux Foundation in April 2009, and Moblin worked on netbooks precisely because netbooks were small laptops. Phones were a different proposition, and Moblin had no handset interface, no telephony stack and no manufacturer shipping it on a phone.
Nokia had all three. From Intel’s side the merger bought a handset partner and a body of mobile engineering that would have taken years to hire, and it bought them in exchange for something Nokia had no interest in building: an x86 build target. That is why MeeGo compiled for ARM and x86 from a single tree, and why the same release could produce an Atom netbook image and an image for an ARM handset.
Linaro and the ARM side of the industry
Linaro was founded in June 2010 by six companies from the ARM side of the industry: ARM, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments. Its purpose was narrower than a platform and therefore more durable than one. Rather than build an operating system, Linaro consolidated the low-level work every ARM Linux system duplicates, including kernel support for system-on-chip families, toolchain optimisation and validated quarterly source releases, and it did so without choosing a distribution.
That neutrality is the part worth understanding. Linaro’s output was meant to be consumed by MeeGo, by Android and by anything else running on ARM, so its founding was not a vote for MeeGo so much as insurance against the outcome where the software that mattered on ARM was optimised by somebody else. Two of the six founders were making the exact silicon this story runs on: Texas Instruments built the OMAP 3430 in the N900 and the OMAP 3630 in the N9, and ST-Ericsson, itself a joint venture of STMicroelectronics and Ericsson formed in 2009, was supplying modem and application processors across the industry.
Atom in smartphones, and how far it got
Atom in smartphones did eventually happen, and by the time it did the phones were running something else. Intel’s Medfield platform, the Atom Z2460, was shown in January 2012 and reached buyers during 2012 in handsets such as the Lava Xolo X900 in India, the Orange San Diego in the United Kingdom and the Motorola RAZR i. Every one of them ran Android. The operating system Intel had co-founded to carry Atom into phones was closed before Intel’s phone silicon arrived.
The push did not last either. Intel cancelled its remaining smartphone system-on-chip programmes in 2016, ending the line of reasoning that had produced Moblin in 2007 and MeeGo in 2010. ARM designs, from the companies that founded Linaro and the ones that came after them, took the market outright.
What the sponsors left behind
The sponsors left behind an operating system nobody owned, which turned out to be the useful part. In September 2011 the Linux Foundation and Intel announced Tizen and MeeGo was folded toward it, but the MeeGo core had been public from the start, so it could be forked without anyone’s permission. Mer was that fork, stripped back to a reusable base.
Former Nokia engineers built on it. Jolla was formed in 2011 out of people leaving the MeeGo work, and Sailfish OS is the system they built from Mer, still developed and still shipping long after both original sponsors stopped funding anything in this line. The N900 and the N9 also gained a long afterlife of community operating systems for the same reason: hardware adaptation code that is public does not stop being useful when the company that published it changes strategy.