Re: N900 Advice
 

I have never used personalised ringtones or voice dialling, so I'd call them 'extremely rich'. ;) Don't think my last phone had them either. One of the things we forget is that not all users are coming from a high feature n-series or iphone. There are a lot of phones out there that do very, very little beyond call and text. ;) And no shortage of user who never ask their phone to do anything else. Those of us used to pushing our devices to the limit tend to see those limit-lines as 'normal' but they're not where everyone is.

As for MfE, I don't use it. But my understanding from thread-reading is that basic MfE connection works pretty well ok now, even with the older versions. What doesn't work is some of the stuff like very server-specific provisioning. So I'd say that was pretty obscure. If your provider is using something like that, you might want to check before purchase: if you have a standard set-up, I gather MfE is fine.

Re: N900 Advice
 

I never claimed that there is no room for 'commercial developers' (if by that you mean developers and/or companies selling their products to the end users) in the Maemo technosphere. You are the one who implied that if Nokia don't get their store right, no developer will want to 'waste their time' developing for the Maemo platform, which simply isn't true - all of the applications you see in the Extras repository are a simple proof of that, many of them existed even before Nokia made N900 somewhat Ovi Store compatible. Furthermore, the beauty of the Maemo platform is that you don't have to beg Nokia for almost anything if you want to develop and sell your software on the N900, nor you need to go through their approval process - you can set your own repository and sell your software directly without giving a dime to Nokia, or asking them if they are ok with your application. Just because that is how its set on the iPhone/iPod/iPad market doesn't make it the right, or the only way to 'skin a cat' - I much more prefer the Maemo way, as a developer, and as an user as well.

If you really want an input on this subject from the perspective of a developer who makes a living by selling his software to the end users, check THIS post.

There are millions of developers selling their software directly on the Windows, MacOS and various Linux platforms, with no centralized place or an arbitrary censor and, believe it or not, despite the huge success of Apple's App Store, the vast majority of software is still sold directly. I see no reason why would it be any different with the Maemo platform.

This would require a huge discussion that would stray off too much from this topic, but I'll try to explain in short.

First of all, I never said that I'm not getting paid for what I do - there is no such a thing as free lunch, after all. I said that I don't charge to the end users (as in regular people), which is a huge difference - I still charge companies for implementing my solutions. There are couple of ways allowing me to make a decent living:

1) Developing custom software/services for specific needs - that is almost exclusively the only non-FOSS development I do. Sometimes due to the corporate policy (quite common when dealing with banks) they insist on using non-FOSS solutions, or licensing of some of the used products prohibits re-licensing under some of the copyleft licenses. While this area is usually the most lucrative, I personally avoid it unless the deal is really good, as in many cases it requires reinventing the wheel over and over again, which leads to developer boredom.
2) Developing custom platforms/implementations and providing the support - this is my personal favorite way of getting the green bills. It's much like the first way but with the exception of mainly employing FOSS solutions and usually convincing the client to leave the system completely open even if not required by the license of any of the integrated elements. If some change needs to be made to the implemented FOSS solutions - be it a bug fix, additional feature or a different implementation of already existing feature - I commit that to the original solution so the whole community sees the benefit. This way I've contributed to various Apache, Mozilla and other less-known projects, and any user using those today benefited in a small way from my personal involvement without paying me a dime, just as I've seen benefit from other contributors without paying them anything.
3) Donation-ware development - while I don't directly involve myself in such development, primarily because of the awkward banking laws in my country making PayPal and other simple solutions unavailable, this is a perfectly viable solution for earning something by developing FOSS software. It may not be the perfect way as most people prefer to play it cheap, but as an additional income it still stands as a valid approach - after all, you do what you love, and if you get some money by doing that, all the better.

There are a couple of other approaches, usually a mix of the aforementioned, that would take too long to explain, and this thread is not exactly the best place to talk about it, so if you want to go into details please open a new topic in an appropriate forum.

Do you think that Nokia paid a dime to Linus Torvalds, or any other person responsible for today's notion of Linux? Did you pay them (developers, not Nokia) anything? Yet you are using Linux on your device. So, how do those developers make a living? Think about it...

I never said that some developers don't need to get paid for their work. All the developers need, unless they have a recently deceased uncle who left them a fortune in his will. It's the approach that one developer chooses on how he/she will make a living. I prefer to work `in the open` and charge for my services rather than my code, others may prefer different. I'd argue that I made more money by developing FOSS solutions than I could've possibly made by creating and selling proprietary solutions.

As for more development houses jumping on board, that really has nothing to do with the state of Ovi Store or Nokia, but with the user base. It's like asking why Adobe is not providing Photoshop for the Linux platform - the possible gain from that move does not justify development time, at least not short-term, and every company has its own policies. Number of N900 users is just a blip on the global platforms radar and is still hardly justifiable for some company, focused on selling software to the end users, to put aside resources needed to develop their solutions for the Maemo platform. When a certain threshold of Maemo devices `in the wild` is reached, you can bet that more `development houses` will join the ride.