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

Ah, now I see the "magic way", to drop from league-leader into almost-bankrupt state. Don't use common-sense and hide most important answers from investors, analysts, competitor, own customers, employers, and everyone else - acts instead as ADHD, changing "tactic" every few months, of course to fool competitors ;) That's a good start of professional suicide.

Still, I must agree with You, that it seems to be common trend amongst companies from "this league" - for both "we won't tell You" and "heading to bankrupt" aspects ;)
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100% seriously though, I don't want You to get Nokia shirt and start defending Your employer, so going back on-topic:

Where we would like to know definite answers from Nokia? almost everywhere. Lets take simplest, and least-demanding thing from this thread - ivgalvez's proposition's part 4 - renaming. Actually, is it needed? It depends - if Nokia is going to fulfill own old promises about handling Maemo trademark to community, Maemo can become synonym for "Open Mobile" initiative. If Nokia is willing to hold Maemo name tight and take it to grave, we indeed should rename.
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Of course, it was just simple example, there is much more than that. Some time ago, You (qgil) requested info about "promise" made by Nokia. You were given sources - ironically, it turned out to be quote from You. From that time, we haven't received single comment about this issue (from You as Nokia employee, this time) - not even "I'll check current status".

I know that there are many important things going on - like Community OBS and it's licensing - but it doesn't make other things less important. It's hard to plan such wide-scope things, like started by You in this thread, without knowing anything more than "Nokia is commuted on paying bills" .

I've said this in the past, and I'm going to repeat it - we're very grateful (without any irony) for paying bills, and it's indeed helping much. But paying bills isn't everything, and definitely, it shouldn't stop us from deciding, which whom we want to sleep.

/Estel

// Edit

Yea, so called "Future of Maemo" threads. How many of those we've had? Ten?

I must admit, that this one is more constructive (well, we have someone to discuss with from Nokia side - no matter, if he talks as employee or as Community member ;) - which couldn't be said about marias non-existing involvement...), but half of things is indeed rephrased.

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

I agree that discussion in the community is good, but I doubt we'll get a consensus here. It may bring out a few more items or directions we didn't see before, which is always good. In the end, the final decision on direction is going to need to be decided by Council. To do that, we do need input from the community.

It is appreciated. I think the difficulty comes from the fact that sometimes you do speak as a Nokia employee, and telling the difference between "community" you and "Nokia" you can be difficult. In some communities where I've had a similar role I actually made two accounts: One for the company me, the other for the community me. It gave people a clear distinction of when I was speaking in a company role vs a personal role. While that may not be fitting for you here, perhaps something as subtle as a font or color change when speaking officially could help that?

Yes and no. Sometimes there are nuances that can be said that are not part of the public announcements but are known policies. For example, your comment on how funding cycles work, and how changes are done (assumptive renewal) are not officially announced by Nokia, but helpful to know when some community members are spooked about site funding.

This is a very hard question to answer without some type of road map into the future. Let me ask you this: Had you asked the council this question in May 2008, before the N900 was announced, what would their answer have been? My bet is they would turn and ask "when is the next device due?"

In this case, the community is facing something it's never really faced until now: Nokia has said there will not be a "next device". Without that, defining where things will be is like asking us to look into a crystal ball. We can give a plan of where we see things going, but that could change radically from unannounced changes from other groups. Be that Nokia announcing a new device, or some new player showing up.

Personally, I think the current definition is sufficient, though it could use a touch-up to include recent changes. Even with the current theme, we're not quite on target fully. We don't have solid integration with Harmattan, for example, which should have already been in the fold. (And is being worked on, thanks to many here.)

Until a new (hardware) target takes a clear lead, I don't see a community shift away from what is already being done. I do think, with the number of projects going on in 3rd party spaces, that another front runner will appear in the next year or so.

Perhaps a good start would be setting up a group (or someone taking a task) to look at what's out there, how viable it is, and see if there's a community view on what is and isn't "required" for supporting a shift to a new platform. It could be the GTA04, or the Vivaldi, or some other project. But something will come along. And when it does, that shift should be obvious, and hopefully fluid.

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

This is what I want in 6 months :)

Make this site a home for some but not all Linux FOSS devices

it should be based on Qt/Gtk like:

* all old Linux Nxxx devices
* N9/N950
* Vivaldi Plasma active based tablet
* Raspberry PI

Tizen based devices no go until they officiallly supports QT IMHO.
Androids no go they have theyr ow sites...

Maemo should be a place for cool FOSS devices not only Nokias.

Offtopic maybe, but the site really needs a facelift too and mobilebased forum ;)

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

SD69, I'd say the Qt Project has even more reasons to be interested about the future plans of Nokia but that discussion is probably futile here. I'm taking right now your advice as current Council. Wearing my Nokia shirt here from now on.

Estel, when I say league I include any manufacturer of devices regular people buy - regardless of their sales and financial trends. But you know that, so let's move on.

What problem are you willing to solve by "handling Maemo trademark to community"? I'm not a legal expert but I guess a trademark needs to be own by a legal entity, being an individual or a constituted organization. As for today "the community" is none of that. You can hint again to the need of creating a legal entity, but still it would be good to know first the problem you want to solve.

If maemo.org wants to increase its scope beyond the Maemo OS I don't see why it can't.

If maemo.org wants to be renamed to something else, this doesn't affect the Maemo trademark.

For reference: http://maemo.org/legal/terms_of_use/trademarks/

What was the issue? I remember Jaffa asking for some sources that happened to be himself referring to a post from mine. I have tried to find those posts now, can't find them again.

I took the issue of the EULAs vs the OBS to the Nokia legal team. Soumya compiled the list of packages affected and it's copyright status. We haven't heard from them yet.


Note that I started this thread after a (literally) pub discussion with two community members not working at Nokia. Next time I'll let them start the thread themselves. :)

Exactly.

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

Issue is exactly what You've described here - using "Maemo" as term for Community around mobile, Linux based, FOSS as much as it can be etc. devices and software.

If You're saying (wearing Nokia shirt) that Nokia doesn't have anything against usage of Maemo name (being Nokia's trademarks) for things not related to Nokia products, it's fine, and answers my question.

Ho ever, are You 100% sure that - lets theorize/dream for a while - Maemo Community "splits out" FOSS (hardware and software) device, that becomes real competitor for any future Nokia's device (as I said, purely hypothetical situation), Nokia won't have anything against usage of terms like "powered by Maemo Community" when "advertising" competing device, etc? To be honest,m it's hardly imaginable for me. On the other hand, I can pretty easily imagine Cease & Desist letters ;)

If - which I really doubt - the above is true and guaranteed (no problem for usage of Maemo name for future FOSS projects, like Vivaldi, but on bigger scale), then I'll agree than there is no other problem - for now - with trademarks, and EULA/OBS thing is only one we need to worry about.

/Estel

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

@community: We must resist viewing Quim as only a Nokia employee and repeat questions for him that he can't answer. We'll only make him repeat answers we already know, make him not want to come over here and start these useful threads.

@Quim: please take the shirt off. I don't think the Nokia you has to offer anything more except whatever you have already told us. On the other hand I think you as Quim has much to offer, through personal involment and the deep experience with communities and free software.

That said, I propose we create a task force for investigating new device proposals (as someone already mentioned). There needs to be at least one developer with kernel and driver knowledge, one community representative to speak with whoever needs to be spoken and one tester willing to spend time helping the developer have something that hints to the successful porting of (insert software stack here) to the candidate hardware.

My proposal is to take this approach in five steps

1. Create a poll where general type of device will be decided (will it be a tablet, phone, netbook etc) There is much to talk about here as some devices have broader acceptance, some have inherent issues with porting our software on them, some are less 'mobile' but are easier to run anything on them. A final statement should emerge of the style: The candidate devices should be tablets with phone functionality between 5 and 7 inches or The candidate devices should be touch enabled with at least 1GB of ram

2. Accept nominations and elect a 'new device taskforce'. A group of three or more people with the task to gather info about candidate devices and lay the pros and cons out in a public place (wiki?). Then we will have to rule some out and stay with a single digit number of devices

3. Gather some funds and purchase one of each of those candidate devices. Hand them off to major developers here with the sole obligation from them to do their best to have something working on them in a time span of 3 months. Results should be publicly available.

4. At the end of the 3 month period we should compare the results. Rule out the devices where a wall was hit and choose the most promising one or two.

5a. We proclaim one or two devices 'hero device of maemo.org' and urge members looking for a new device to go for it. Actively and timely create a new subforum for the new device. Assemble funds and send a number of devices to key developers to create traction.

5b. None of the devices is good enough, day to day use seems a distant dream, where we won't get before the device is already obsolete. We must be wary of this scenario because if we choose a device which has major roadblocks (e.g. smartphone with no calling functions possible due to driver issues) we are in danger to never gain the needed traction and delay the possible fix even more thus turning to vaporware. If we find that this is the case we should start discussing again whether a new hardware project like openpandora is the way to go.

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

One thing is to increase the scope of maemo.org to non-Maemo platforms and devices. I don't see any problem as long as Maemo platforms and devices are not banned. (following your line of quite-impossible hypothetical cases) ;)

Another thing is that someone ships a product saying that it's based on Maemo when it is not based on the Maemo OS. If someone is interested in the latter then we can discuss. To pick two precedents, "Maemo Community Update" has been around for a while and nothing has happened, while Vivaldi says that is "powered by Mer Core and KDE's Plasma Active".

Mer and/or Vivaldi could decide to leverage on maemo.org their user forums, causing no trademark conflicts.

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

If you don't mind I'll keep it until my Summer holidays. :) There are important things to discuss (unlike this one, really). At some point there will be a first meeting with the new council and if this is still a problem we can discuss there.

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

And there we go again. A thread about updating http://maemo.org/intro/ (which really should be updated) turned into this weird forking the community and give us the trademarks discussion. So looks like we will not be updating the community's intro page.

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

To be honest, I would just remove that page, I don't think it actually serves any purpose.
(I must be turning into a wikipedia deletionist :) )