Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Some things should never be said even in jest.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

apologes on my confusion about TMO vs MO - this is why i defer my questions to those with expertise in this thread :)

This is a topic that is very relevant to all users here - especially as user sof the N900 flash and reinstall VERY often and so create huge traffic on the repos.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

I am not jesting, I will pay handsomley for it.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

I am not willing to work with abill_uk on this, but thanks for the suggestion.

But I can sketch out a way to kick it off initially.

1. A group would get together and agree to be the custodian of any funds raised. It could be the current council or some other group.

2. Someone would post that emergency funds are being solicited to preserve the maemo.org forums.

3. The group would have full authority over the dispersal of the funds, so if it proved unnecessary to have funds in their view, they could decide to send Texrat on vacation or whatever with them. But if an emergency did arise, they would decide how the funds could be spent.

The actual plan for spending could be evolved by whoever wants to make proposals. The custodial group would have the final responsibility.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Poor abill uk lol!

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Is there a way for people to create their own mirror? That way the software can remain available should it be officially taken offline. I tried to find information but couldn't. I'd like to create my own mirror of the N900 packages.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

HA HA i wish you wish we all wish but sorry to say it has to be the proper way or no way for this community so lets just hope Nokia give that as they sure as hell give is grief over everything else. :D

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Geneven i could not think of anything worse then to have to work with someone like you haha but the community has its own council and does not need anyone outside of that.

Solicit for funds for the benefit of the community is all that is required and members would simply pay the yearly fee, just work out the yearly figure and find out just how many are willing and hey presto cannot get anything more simple.

Not everyone would need to pay to be a member but those that did so could for example have their names written as a donating community member, am sure lots and lots will go for that.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

whats right to say elopcalypse or elopocalypse ?
elopcalypse is used here, while elopocalypse is used elsewhere...

i'm confused, like a blonde from the joke, what's right to say iraq or iran ?

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Tomi T Ahonen?

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Hmm am taking a guess that he messed up Nokia?

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

(apologies if the snipping removes too much context)

I understand T.M.O. to encompass 3 major components (this is from my experience so anyone feel free to correct me on anything I've overlooked):

Talk.
Whist not trivial nor free it sounds as if this could be straightforward to provision (it's has been previously, so is almost a known entity?). Is the DNS / Regsitration for maemo.org under our / the council's control already?

Repositories.
I see this as the most critical part for 'disaster planning' as users depend on these services who are not necessarily party to any of the conversations that happen here and elsewhere - how would an update to sources be communicated if required?
How sustainable is a mirroring approach?
Would it be disruptive to users?
In terms of finding a home for the repos is their anyone else 'upstream' (other than Nokia) who could offer any support - Debian, Gnome etc

This is the part I wouldn't know how to go about solving.

Garage.
The primary services of source code hosting, bug tracking and mail-list management could be replaced with usage of external free services; sourcecode hosting (Github or Sourceforge), mailing lists (Google Groups etc)
Whilst I'm sure this doesn't offer a feature for feature replacement - it should cover the core.


Naturally, the best outcome would be funding to continue as it is now, but we are talking Plan B / C here.

Just my thoughts on how to approach minimising some of the costs, I'm sure I've missed a lot of the subtlety though.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

For one. The funding need to be handled by some entity that can take responsibility. Like the Council. They are elected. There should be a minimum of two who can follow the donations. A board meeting could be held once a month. The board decide how it will be spent. It could also be made public once a month as an extra layer of insight. The more open the process is the less arguing will be the outcome.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

+ a bunch of things mentioned here, and of course backups.

A simple whois query shows that it's not.

Perhaps some hosting companies who are already contributing servers or mirrors to other projects could be approached.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Isn't there a FOSS promoting consultancy firm that actually manage the m.o servers currently? I may be wrong, but I thought they said that if Nokia "pulled the plug" on funding, they'd continue to support it. Though I may be way off-the-mark here. :)

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

I am not sure exactly but to my knowledge TMO are funded through the Meego project. So we are a part of Meego so to say. Now when Nokia have decided to retreat from Meego as primary platform the funding will get slimmer. I don't know if it is Big Nokia or someone within the Meego project that can decide on TMO's future.

It would be logical if it was someone within the Meego project. And if so i think they don't dare cut the funding.. not directly anyway. An approach like that would almost hurt the Meego community as much as the Maemo community.

However there is no way to be certain here. We need to solve the funding someway anyway. There are plenty of stuff that could become possible with money. Not just the future of TMO but also development of key functions.

Thus the importance of the Council have grown a lot. It is very important they take the lead in this. If the current organization layout needs to be reconstructed then the direction of that layout need to be decided upon soon. We need to have the ability to continue whatever the path ahead o us is.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Oh.. here are a post by Qgil on this topic: http://forum.meego.com/showpost.php?...3&postcount=19

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

My bet is that the powers that be here will try to stick to Nokia till the funding is pried from their dead fingers. That might even be the best strategy. I am rather confused about where Reggie stands in all this, BTW.

In any case, my potential involvement has just dropped a lot; I am abandoning Nokia and even Smartphones in general. All I have ever really needed, as I have repeatedly stated, is the ability to make a phone call if my car breaks down on the freeway. Other than that, I do most of my computing at home.

I hope that a wonderful tablet awaits me someday. This site cleverly abandoned the name InternetTabletTalk, and Nokia itself cleverly abandoned tablets as a niche product with no future. So that pretty much means that my direction is parting from this site and from Nokia. Since there are a number of clever people here, I probably won't be able to resist returning here from time to time, but my interest in what happens to this site has abruptly begun to drop.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Why not just use a dumb domain of ourmaemo.org
It's not a hard transition.
This is a poor idea, but easy enough for a domain solution. If we are staying with Maemo, then the domain should have it included.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

That particular one would be a trademark violation for one thing.

I would say it is, if it means that every user has to modify their package repository settings (and redo it every time they reflash). Then there are things like mailing list subscriptions, autobuilder ssh keys etc.

A clean break and move to another domain is not altogether impossible but it will be very painful and it's best avoided if at all possible.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Has anyone compiled a list of what things in Maemo aren't committed upstream, (and possibly why)?
By upstream, I mean drivers into the Linus' kernel, patches to any common apps and Qt etc.

Since Nokia has left us to dry, we need to turn Maemo into a generic mobile handset distro, start work on removing all reliance on specific features of N900. So that in the future, at least code can be reused.

Maybe it's possible that merging maemo software into the Openwrt distro is a good idea?
Openwrt already works great for low memory ARM targets, and probably has the easiest build time configurator around.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Hardware drivers, iirc, are all merged upstream (thus their availability in MeeGo.)

That's what MeeGo is for. It contains nothing proprietary in the OS, and any device-specific bits are available through the MeeGo project.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

I think I need to buy me 1 or 2 more n900s to finally start testing meego. *mumble*
It's so silly that most operators don't offer multiple sims for a single subscription anymore in Sweden :(

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Nope. TMO and maintenance of maemo.org are handled via a different contract than MeeGo forums and other infrastructure.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

I just saw on the Mint blog that they are able to get about $5000 a month on donations. Maybe not comparable but still... also have noted that more and more people are offering donations but have no place to donate. If we wait too long we might lose the momentum.

Are the Council working on a solution? Maybe start a new thread on this?

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

No-one's volunteered yet a concrete solution to how to handle donations into a slush fund. Who holds the keys? Who gets to decide how it's spent? What if it isn't spent? How does it get transferred from one council to another? What if another rogue element gets elected to the council who makes a lot of noise before the election, and then does nothing during his term? What if he ran off with the money?

The Council are aware of it (see Tim's post). There's about to be another election, but I see no reason why interested community members couldn't start coming up with a proposal. And I mean a proper proposal rather than just "duh, open a PayPal account". The Council are volunteers, we're not supposed to do everything, after all!

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Although I agree that moving to a new domain would take time and effort, I disagree it should be avoided at all costs. For it has one major advantage: it would allow a clean and fresh new start.

All information could be set up in a new fresh way. Instead of several threads on the forum a setup like a wiki would make finding info easier. Forums can be used for discussion (instead of information being scattered across threads).

Just my 2 cents on the matter ;)

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Sort of like having http://wiki.maemo.org/ and http://talk.maemo.org/ ?!

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

I wonder how many really reflash their device on a regular basis.

In my mind (which could be wrong, feel free to correct me) there is the mass who love the N900 and simply use it. They will update and continue to use it. And there are the people who have a (lovely) twitch and tweak, flash their N900 whenever they think they can get something new into it.

If maemo.org comes to an halt, it might be an option to create Community images instead of the original Nokia images used to (re)flash the N900. Of course it would depend on how willing Nokia would be to allow this since there is closed software in it. But if maemo.org comes to an end and Nokia won't allow the use of any (closed) material, flashing with official images will always pose a problem.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Yep, Wiki is a great tool. But the more you document there, the more you need to spend time updating the documentation. Documentation in the forum threads is a safer bet for the developers. Of course it would be great if all the documentation would be available in Wiki, but nothing is more annoying than outdated documentation.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Exactly, but without the bits and pieces that cover other releases and different kind of phones. I can imagine that splittings things up might make things more clear for people who start new. For example if I go and look around for information related to the N900 I will not look at parts for N770, N800 or N810. But now all is available on one page.

Of course the experienced users know where to look. But getting new people seems also important (new people could mean new developers)?

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

So in your new domain, we'd ditch owners and users of N8x0 and 770 devices?

Feel free to get involved with those managing the wiki.

Anyway, this is all a bit of a moot point, if/when Nokia withdraw funding, I don't imagine there'll be a problem continuing with the *.maemo.org domains.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

First of all, I am not talking about ditching anybody.
But about sorting out (nx80.domain.org/n770.domain.org/etc.).
For new users things might be overwhelming.


We already talked about getting involved ;)


Oh, I absolutely agree with you on this.
Getting that clear seems to be a priority.
But that might be something which could take some time.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Thanks for the reply. I wouldn't mind coming up with an idea... actually i already wrote my main idea down a couple of posts back. Not very extensive but still.

I don't know exactly how the Council are working. I do not either have any experience in "internet organizations" where it is hard to meet in person. Although i have seated many years as a board member in the local union and non-profit organizations.

If the Council is organized as a board then we could use that structure to be able to enable funding through donations.

This structure could look different depending on country.

* One of the Council members are the cashier (elected within the council).
* Must always need two peoples signature when money are withdrawn from account. (normally cashier & chairman)
* The two/three who have access to the account need to sign an agreement/contract. The access will terminate after a year.
* The cashier note all debit and credit. (in and out flow)(gdoc maybe?)
* Every month the cashier make an annual report (preferably also public). Of what the money have been spent on e.t.c..
* The cashier can not be alone to hold an account (like flattr and similar). There need to be transparency.
* The council after majority vote (more than 50%) decides where the money will go. If Maemo dies it could be donated only to another Open Source project.
* A secure vote system are advised. (for community votes)
* The first thing after a new Council have been elected is to choose a cashier. The old account handlers need to sign another agreement/contract to verify they do not have access anymore.


...this is a couple of points the Council can decide upon. The organizational structure of the Council need to be addressed first. How are the Council going to work in this new environment.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

This question.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Thanks for that, I've created http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_Council/Community_fund as a proposal based on your post. However, there are still some technicalities that need to be decided on.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

It is no problem to sign up as a non-profit organization. (what i could see)

www.paypal.com >> Signup >> Business >> Website payments standard >> Business type "non-profit organization"

And there can be more than one user to have access. Also it is possible to export to excel..

I agree that this might be best handled by the next council.

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Except for both PayPal US and PayPal UK they require evidence of your charitable stauts (501(c)(3) or something in the US, and a charity number in the UK). Founding a charity is not easy or "no problem".

Indeed, very cool. But can we remove access from people? On the mailing list (worth checking) there's been an alternative suggestion:

http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...ry/004679.html

Re: Question for the community/council - Maemo/Meego
 

Maybe this has been asked already... but are we at a point where we should consider talks with Nokia and open source foundations/nonprofits (perhaps even the Linux Foundation, a great fit IMO) to see if governance of maemo.org could be assumed by an interested party?

Ok, just found GeraldKo's thread: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=70316