Re: Just an observation - (no flames please)
 

One man's trash... and, who's to say what's good and isn't? The lack of policing and control is one of the things that makes OSS what it is: If you don't like it, don't look at it. If you can find a use for some of the abandoned code, even better. (that's a general you, not you specifically)

I can't even begin to understand what you're seeing regarding the 770 apps if you think it's the same even had the 800 not come about..

Overall, you've made your point. Several times, in several places.

Re: Just an observation - (no flames please)
 

Better separation of hardware and software. Refer to Ari's blog for an article some time back on the subject.

Re: Just an observation - (no flames please)
 

@spycedtx,

Who are you to tell anyone to do anything. Are you trying to regulate this forum? Wait, isn't this supposed to be what discussion is all about? Oh I forgot, it's okay as long as your point is the only one that matters.

Other than your comments, everything and everyone has been civil. No matter, here is my suggestion to you, don't like what I say, ignore it.

Re: Just an observation - (no flames please)
 

I believe you took my "don't look at it, or use it" as a personal "you". It's a general "you".

Re: Just an observation - (no flames please)
 

cat fi----- geek fight, geek fight!

Re: Just an observation - (no flames please)
 

Be nice, you can see I went back and changed my post. :)

Re: Just an observation - (no flames please)
 

I agree with you in principle. BUT ... if we take the Zaurus as an example. There we have a small community, fragmented, with a few egos getting in the way a bit. There are several main distributions - the stock installation from Sharp which was stable but crap, Cacko, which was a tweaking exercise based on the Sharp distro and was a vast improvement. But Anton moved on and its no longer updated.

The OpenZaurus folks always wanted to be bleading edge, and as a result it was never stable out of the box, and took a lot of effort to get to a workable state.

Then, along came pdaxrom. It was a one man show, and he would allow no-one to help. Although things have been opened up a bit in the last year, by the time a useful distro was produced, the Zaurus was discontinued.

Don't get me wrong ... I have the highest regard for everyone involved in the Zaurus community. My argument here is that because each of these groups decided to do their own thing, rather than finding a way to work together, less progress was made in the longer term. (In fact the OpenZaurus guys started the OpenEmbedded effort for this very reason, in an effort to increase the size of the developer community by creating a build system which gave them the ability to build software easily for many different platforms)

When the community is small, I believe we do not have the luxury to sit in our own little silos, only doing the things we want to do rather than seeing the bigger picture.

I don't know if its possible to get people to work in any other way when they are volunteering their time for free. But it seems to me that between Nokia and ourselves, we should agree a clear roadmap for the product, and some kind of concerted effort to move the thing in a direction that suits most people.

That's what I would like to see.

And I would also like to see the non developers here, like myself, contributing in other ways. Documentation, project management, application testing ... there are many ways folks can help out.

Re: Just an observation - (no flames please)
 

You are correct that this unfinishedness is more visible in the open source world. I would argue that due to the nature of open source necessitating everything being open and visible to anyone, everyone gets to see all the guts and messy bits. Sometimes the well polished diamonds and the money making finished products get lost to those new to the community. I agree that this openness turns a lot of people off just like seeing the inside of a sausage factory would turn off a lot of sausage eaters. It doesn't mean that most sausages aren't tasty though and it doesn't mean that most open source software is half done and broken.

Apple took an open source infrastructure and put on a glossy finish for a limited subset of hardware and marketed the hell out of it and hid all the nasty bits from the end-user. Apple is the Oscar Mayer of the computing world. Open source infrastructure is the meat grinder. I hesitate to speculate where Microsoft fits into this analogy for fear of wandering into troll territory :]

There are other sausage vendors out there, they just don't have the marketing money to promote themselves but they are probably tastier.

Re: Just an observation - (no flames please)
 

@w14,

Great post. You summed up everything I was trying to say. Thanks for the insight.

@mwiktowy,

Nice. I don't eat sausage but I do feel where you are coming from. Would it be too hard or restrictive to have a "Finished App" section and a "Developing App" section to distinguish the two? When I say finished, I mean an app that a developer would request money for and provide support for. For me, as long as there is no monetary value attached to an application there is very little support or caring about its outcome.

Re: Just an observation - (no flames please)
 

I think Nokia was trying to do that polish with the Tableteer default interface. They are not quite there yet though. Debian splits things up into stable and unstable. Redhat has a Rawhide to house development work separately from the finished product.

Your request for separation of developing project from stable project is quite reasonable and has a lot of precedent in the Open Source world. That separation was lost with the migration to the new application website (with a lot of other good stuff gained). I suppose the separation is supposed to be between Garage and Applications on Maemo but it is not obvious since not all Applications are developed in the Garage.