News from the Maemo weekend in Copenhagen; Canonical will switch to Maemo-derivative Mer from the Moblin 1.0 build for it’s Ubuntu MID derivative. Moblin 2.0 is no longer MID-focused so it looks like Intel have just lost a significant partner in their MID ecosystem.

From a Ubuntu Wiki page: “Ubuntu MID Edition is now based on Mer, and has been optimised to an even greater degree for small screens, slower processors, and low-memory environments…With the sunset of Moblin 1.0, the previous upstream for MID is dead. The Mer community is active, and actively engaged with Ubuntu, so the flavour is more likely to be kept up-to-date and of interest to users.”

Mer is currently focusing on building for ARM platforms but that doesn’t mean that Ubuntu will keep the same focus. I expect to see both X86 and ARM build from Ubuntu which in itself is very significant. This is also a great boost for the Mer project team.

There’s an obvious question to ask though. If Maemo is open-source, why Mer?

Mer presents itself as an Open Source project that isn’t restricted to a fixed set of hardware:

Maemo is open source – and mature enough to be a strong player in the race to be the platform
developers target and hw vendors use. Many have tried to adapt Hildon
(Debian, Moblin, Ubuntu Mobile) but have hit the wall that the Maemo platform is
closely tied to the Nokia Internet Tablets. That has to be changed – multiple
platforms, one platform, app for one device, app benefits all devices.

(The Mer presentation is available here as a PDF link)

We’ll have to wait to see how this pans out but it looks like we might have a Mer build for Ubuntu 9.10 which could be a real boost for MID and UMPC users that were waiting for Moblin 2.0 and with Maemo and Mer, Nokia and Canonical supporting the projects, it presents a new opportunity for developers in the MID and UMPC space.

Via Maemo member, Quim Gil’s Twitter stream.