Re: How will maemo.org introduce itself in 6 months?
 

Dunno if we need anything formal but the intro page could use an update in any case.

This discussion actually got me thinking why we founded devaamo [1] after the meego thing went south. Before that happened we had a pretty good thing going on. We arranged meetups with technical presentations, visited like minded people, organized meego summit fi and so on. So after meego's demise was clear we had a open for all meeting and discussed about whether we wanted to continue arranging meetups and other events and more importantly what should we focus on. We basically found out that we are interested in lots of things but nothing that could be the main focus. So we decided that Devaamo was to be something that makes possible for open source developers, open hw enthustiasts and such people to do their thing and organise meetups and whatnot under the devaamo umbrella. To me maemo.org feels pretty much the same. It's something that makes possible the different things that are happening here (app/platform development, general gadget discussions, hacking and so on).

I hope that made at least some sense. it's the short-short version of the story :) I've been meaning to write a blog post about the origins of Devaamo (how I saw it) but that's still on my todo list.

[1] http://devaamo.fi/

Re: How will maemo.org introduce itself in 6 months?
 

Why not? What can we loose doing so? If some talented developer is going to switch device ("greener pastures"), she/he will do that, no matter if we're going to have talks about it here or not. If someone is going to stay, having categories about other devices won't hurt (and can even help, due to multiplatform projects).

the only thing we need to achieve in such approach, is non-intrusive coexistence. Simple example - "Active Topic" list on the right, adjustable per user profile - if someone don't want to see new topics from some category, it should be possible to set up.

Those are details, but many of them form something called "peaceful coexistence".

/Estel

Re: How will maemo.org introduce itself in 6 months?
 

For me the community must be gathered by something. The best thing would be a device with FOSS under the hood. If it will be only the idea of FOSS and there will be now devices for end users this community will slowly fade. If new devices will pop out but not from Nokia this will also not help maemo.org as a community. If Nokia wants to be a part of this, play a role in this a device is a must. Only QT is not enough. We need something to put foss on it so we can have more and more users comming here. The question is what will happen if suddenly Tizen and Samsung will pop out with something I do think that people will move to their forum and site. This is how it goes in my opinion. People stay here becuse there are still many N900 and also N9 users stay here. My 3 cents about it :)

Re: How will maemo.org introduce itself in 6 months?
 

I can't stop thinking we need a reference device. Badly. And it must be either something awesome or something cheap, so that many of us will get one.

I for one are not interested at all in tablet devices, I think they are just useless, cumbersome and offer much less than a similarly sized laptop. I would buy one only for the sake of maemo should it be the next reference device, but I wouldn't be able to spend much over $200 on it.

On the other hand I use my phone 18 hours a day, so I can muster a substantially larger amount of money for it. That said, I wouldn't mind a tablet-sized phone (as far as it fits in some kind of pocket)

I think this is true for most people (smartphone is almost a need nowadays, a tablet is a luxury). People will spend money on a phone anyway (even if they got a tablet), on the contrary many people I think would happily allocate their tablet money on a capable FREE phone.

Here comes another question now. How open are the newly born intel devices? Can nemo x86 run on the LePhone or the Lava? Do they have locked bootloaders etc? Is it possible to contact Intel or Lava or Lenovo and ask them to provide a number of devices preinstalled with Nemo for community purposes, at a lower price?
Can we just form a sort of legal entity with sole responsibility to obtain and resell Lava devices (if they are open enough) to community members?

Re: How will maemo.org introduce itself in 6 months?
 

I see the community OBS as one of the key things that could bring devs from different but related projects together. And I'm not talking about tmo or what people talk here about. tmo is a tool within the community not the community.

That said, I would only add subforums for projects, devices or operating systems that are actively participating in this community not just talked about. For example projects like nitdroid, cssu and Mer/Nemo.

Re: How will maemo.org introduce itself in 6 months?
 

I find a bit of irony in the concept that Fremantle users claiming their OS is "better" is considered non-acceptance. Especially when less than a year ago the hostilities (which you now see as non-acceptance) arose mainly from the same claims in the opposite direction. Though I have to say, I've not really seen anyone making the claim that Fremantle is better than Harmattan.

That's a bit extreme. You're talking about not just a different device, but a totally different mind set. It's like asking how a mini owner would feel showing his car at a monster-truck car show. Sure, it's all cars to an outsider; but the communities are too diverse to co-exist pleasantly, as their mentalities tend to be polar opposites.

You can only expand a group so much before the lack of a unified direction causes disharmony and breaks the community apart. I'm not saying you can never add anything; but throwing the barn doors open and trying to pull in everyone isn't an answer either. (You can do that, but then you turn into Gizmodo.) In order to have a stable community, we need groups/devices will fit well and have similar goals and ideologies to the existing group. Most of the other groups that have been brought up in this thread (Mer/Nemo, Tizen, Spark/Vivaldi, etc) have similar qualities. iPhone does not.

I'm really curious where the un-welcome feeling comes from in the Harmattan camp. Where are you seeing people saying "Harmattan sucks", or looking down on Harmattan in this forum? I don't think anyone here has that attitude; or if they do, they have the same attitude against all the devices in this forum (ie they're trolls).

Most of the "hostility" that gets brought up was not toward Harmattan, but early MeeGo. And as most Harmattan and MeeGo folks will tell you, they are not the same thing at all.

That was frankly caused in part by Nokia, in setting up a separate home for MeeGo and inadvertently amplifying the "us vs them" cycle that commonly happens with hardware shifts. There were smaller waves between the N*00 releases, but it all got ironed out because we shared resources and a very similar code base.

Having a small handful of active MeeGo developers show up in the forums bad mouthing Maemo didn't help. It also didn't help when the same group actively discouraged individuals and vendors from developing for Maemo because it was "a dead end", recruiting them to instead to come over to the new MeeGo home to work on "something with a real future". Nothing causes distrust among communities like one side trying to poison the well.

Even with that rocky history, Maemo and MeeGo are still family, and have slowly started to work together. There are Mer/Nemo threads here on TMO, and active discussions about aiming at setting up unified platforms, both forum-wise and OBS-wise, which I hope to see continued by the next Council.

To be frank: I think a lot of this "we're unwelcome here" talk is (IMHO) based mainly on topics that have been settled and moved past for the most part. The main thing stopping Harmattan users from coming here is Harmattan users, not how forum members react or behave toward them. When formeego.com goes dark (which is happening soon AFAIK), the lights here will be on and a welcome mat will be at the front door. Whether Harmattan users come in and join those already here, or go off to form their own home will be more up to them than anything we do here.

Re: How will maemo.org introduce itself in 6 months?
 

Any hostility in any direction is wrong. I am speaking for a general idea here and using Harmattan as an example. The overarching idea is we need to be willing to accept everyone.

Some new users of the N9 are former Iphone users, I'm sure some users here still carry an Iphone. I personally carry a 4s why because it serves a function that neither my N9/N950 nor my N900 can. We need to be willing to be accepting of any mindset that comes here. This is what will help maemo.org succeed and stay relevant for the future.

I'm not saying we should tell everyone to come, I am saying we should be welcoming to all, but be willing to focus on specific groups that we can cater to. You said Mer/Nemo, Tizen, Spark/Vivaldi, all of these I agree with.


Numerous times throughout my time on tmo have I see N900 is better, or N900 can do this or Fremantle is the only true system. It has died down because of windows phone arguments, but it did exist at one point.

This we can agree on.

We still share similar resources and a very similar code base, more than any other operating system out there.

I fully agree with you. Ironically all of those MeeGo developers are nowhere to be found now. So it is our responsibility to help rebuild our community now. To the best of our abilities.

Yes, hopefully we are both part of the next council, so we can help maemo.org flourish.

As long as we keep a welcome mat available, I see no argument, or discouragement at all and we can move forward with an idea or direction for the community if the council chooses that to be something they want to pursue.

Re: How will maemo.org introduce itself in 6 months?
 

I think as well that probably the biggest values a smartphone platform can have are their developers. But to keep your developer base it is important that you provide as much consistency as possible.

Unfortunately, we were lacking consistency quite often; e.g., consider the UI: Hildon(GTK) -> Qt -> QML -(?)-> HTML5? Another example is the packaging system when comparing Fremantle and Harmattan to Nemo: deb -> rpm.

While I do see the point in adding new features and improving things, actually QML is really great after one got used to it, consistency is also important. I know these are sometimes contradicting goals and that assuring consistency is probably hard. But this was one big thing that me, as "occasional" developer, has often tripped me.
And while some may claim that "small transitions" may be "easy" it is still additional effort. Effort that costs time that many "occasional" developers, like me, coding in their scarce spare time, simply don't have. I even often do not agree that transitions were so "small" a UI, e.g., may easily grow complex and needs to be thoroughly tested.

Imho the "other big two" are (to some degree) so successful because they have thousands of devs producing hundreds of thousands of apps. And they, again imho, achieved building such a large developer base by providing much more consistency then we did during the past years.




Additionally, keeping consistency could have avoided this hostility at all. Imho, this hostility just arose because two systems (Fremantle and Harmattan) suddenly had to compete for a very scarce "resource", the developers.
I also think that we shouldn't waste our time and efforts with such useless fights. Instead we should try to search for a least common denominator and identify and solve the problems at hand; e.g., trying to bridge the gap between Fremantle, Harmattan, or Nemo such that apps can be very easily developed and deployed for all system. I do know there is being worked on this. I just use this as an example.


PS: sorry again if this is too off-topic.

Re: How will maemo.org introduce itself in 6 months?
 

The packaging bit is a non-issue. IMO rpm packaging is a lot easier to do and learn than deb. Besides if/when we move to using the community obs for building stuff it makes it pretty trivial to build both rpm and deb packages from the same source package. I'd call that a win-win.

As with pretty much everything in software developement it's a matter of one's willingness to adapt and learn new stuff.

Re: How will maemo.org introduce itself in 6 months?
 

Sorry, but I answer with a quote of mine:

I am not talking about not being willing to learn. It's just if there is a change there is always effort involved to follow/adapt to that change.
Effort that either could be invested otherwise in developing some new, innovative software. Thus, resulting in some possibly nice app not being written or written with some delay.
Or on the other side effort that will not be made in favor of writing said "new app", and thus result in old apps not being "ported" or ported late.
This conflict in interest could be avoided at all by maintaining consistency. And possible result in more, better quality apps in the long term.