Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

In other words, you are referring to the jump of the Maemo contributors to the MeeGo project, right? Guys, the Maemo project would not be what it is without all the passion and brain you have put in this project. And MeeGo will not be as successful without you. If you still believe that the future relies in an open platform rooted in the Linux & free desktop communities the MeeGo project needs YOU. :)

As I see it, MeeGo is a lot more exposed to the community that Maemo ever was or could be, precisely because there is not just one company involved.

It would be good to hear the voices of these early adopters (or anybody else) and their concrete problems e.g. "In Maemo I have done A, B, C during these years and now I can't move forward to the MeeGo project because of X, Y, Z. Unless this changes, all my effort invested in Maemo is wasted in MeeGo."

Also, do you think an elected MeeGo Community Working Group, successor of the Maemo Community Council, would help increasing the weight and of the community in the MeeGo project?

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

i can't move to meego, as it wouldn't be officially supported by Nokia on N900, and i'm not that rich to spend about 500$ every 6 month on new phone, especially when as we see maemo is still buggy and though all this openness most important things are still closed and we don't see even any roadmap. I wouldn't hurry up as the maemo experience wasn't that great. as weel noone said you would stay with meego longer than you stayed with maemo5.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Not Maemo specific but a good summary of the current situation with mobiles:

Chris Ziegler via http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/14/e...e-brand-sucks/


My point being, I'm not sure about you, but I don't see anything on the market that appeals to me.

Maemo could have filled that gap...

But for now, just try and pry away my N810.

And for the record it's not just end-users that are hurt, it's developers too.

Also ignore the spy. His name rhymes with sqgil.

/rant

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

This is what MeeGo is all about: a platform developed openly and continuosly by different stakeholders, there not depending on a single one going after a single product.

MeeGo ships a new stable release every 6 months and its development is continuous.

MeeGo is indeed a huge effort involving an amount of professional and fully dedicated developers that cabn't be easily matched by volunteers alone. Still, corporate developers alone can't bring as much success to MeeGo as corporate developers collaboragting within a wide and rich community full of profiles of all kinds.

This is why it is key that the Maemo community feels welcome and gets involved in the MeeGo project. "MeeGo not officially supported in the N900" is a visible short term obstacle but I believe it will be left behind when you start seeing MeeGo and MeeGo-Harmattan running in your current devices.

By the way, is someone really thinking MeeGo is "the enemy"? I wonder what provided Maemo that MeeGo can't provide at a community level. In fact the structural problems that concerned the Maemo community can be much better addressed an fixed in MeeGo (like depending from a single comany: in the near future if you like the MeeGo OS but not what you consider Nokia missteps you will be able to go for another vendor keeping intact your personal involvement in this community and project.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

No no no... sorry for being obtuse (had a tooth removed today and I'm a little loopy).

I'm referring to the rough, stop-start evolution of Maemo with the first bullet. The perception Nokia created of prematurely abandoning device generations. In a strictly commercial platform, that sort of churn is okay. But not with devices that are more PC than phone, and especially a platform that's oriented around an open source OS.

And that gets to the other point: Maemo never really became a platform. With a platform you have breadth and depth, and some overlap/transition between generations.

Maemo appealed to the sort of people who actually love skunkworks programs-- but these same people never see a device dying in a year much less six months. To use myself as an example: I build all my PCs, and once built I upgrade them gradually, a component here and there. I put most of my focus on the motherboard because that's the core, the part that lasts several years.

The Maemo devices were in an interesting spot because they are more like PCs than phones but without the hardware upgradability. But again, consider the mentality of the people who would naturally be drawn to them. Hint: there are still people finding uses for 770s.

So when I say "burning early adopters" I mean the fostering of feelings of abandonment when Nokia moved fast and hard from one device to the next with little true continuity. I haven't complained much for myself because I didn't pay for mine. But anyone who shelled out big money for the tablets and N900 could not afford to be so cavalier. And what I'm saying isn't news-- these are old complaints that just don't seem to find any resonance with Nokia.

Thanks.

Maybe in some respects, but there's still too much of a corporate look and feel. In my opinion.

That statement concerns me. Those voices have been expressed here. But maybe they were too diffused?

I would hope so, but I'm still not completely happy with Nokia-council engagement yet. I always saw the council as a strong partner with Nokia. I haven't felt much like a partner either term... lesser so now. And Intel seems so distant and aloof.

I want to invoke another icon to make a point: RevdKathy. She came in as a "total noob" in her words, and quickly became one of the most popular members here. I took to her immediately because, like me, she's a "glue" person. Facilitator. Gap-filler. The kind of person MeeGo will need to be a true community.

But Kathy felt that Maemo was deteriorating and MeeGo felt unwelcome.

If we can't keep people like RevdKathy, there is no true community.

If I'm not making much sense I'm sorry. Maybe I should try again tomorrow if I don't have to take pain medicine. Even better, hopefully others will chime in.

EDIT: just to make sure I don't come off as simply griping-- I really, really appreciate the time you have been putting in lately Quim. That tells me you are serious about making things work. I'm glad Nokia has you. But you need to be cloned. ;)

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

People loosing more faith and trust from nokia from this rapid changeover that they have announced. texrat?
Maemo5 was like when a dog sees his friend(master) after a long period of time and his friend plays with him for 5 minutes and goes to shut the room and leave the dog outside.
every company needs a change and everyone likes a change but it has to be gradual, not where one month there is how great is maemo and next we are going to leave maemo completely in commumity's hands and are going to focus more for the next big thing.
i understand that is completely a business decision but it is these kind of decisions which might hunt you(nokia) back.
(do i even make sense? this vodka is pretty good)

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Not jumping around, but plenty of tests and lessons learned. It's easy for you to judge from a distance years after, but the decisions are made in a less comfortable context. With Maemo Nokia has made plenty of decisions that had no precedent and not even direct references, and has put a risk and investment that not many other companies have put trusting the potential of the Linux and free software communities.

Bringing the standard Linux and free desktop stack to a position where it could lead mobile development was not easy. It was (and it is) a task that requires thousands of patches accepted in dozens of open source projects you don't directly control and have several stakeholders, from Kernel to Mozilla with everything in between. It also required creating a bunch of open source projects that now benefit even laptop users of any Linux distro. Then Qt got into the game offering an API style, application framework and developer tools that, again, needed a lot of development and polishing for the mobile context. And Web Runtime is also landing, completing the equation.

This path is more complicated and heavyweight than the one taken by Android or Palm with their isolated environments on top of a customized Linux stack. Still, I believe it's a more sustainable and powerful path that will bring a higher success to this platform.

If it would have been easy to do something more evolutive and at the same time as fast as Mawemo evolved, other would have probably done it. Still, I claim what Nokia has done with Maemo is already complex enough. Without Nokia doing these steps and taking these risks before anybody else, what choices would you have now for your mobile device? I believe it is fair to say that without the contributions Nokia has done to the Linux and free desktop stack in the last years even the Linux based competitors would be a much harder time putting their products together nowadays.

... and with MeeGo Nokia keeps taking risks and investment in the Linux and free software communities now with MeeGo, still making life easier to other competitors while benefiting as well from this collaboration.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

No worries, enjoy Maemo 5 in the N900. Ar least for me is the best choice I can get in a shop nowadays. One day you will be able to give a try to MeeGo or MeeGo-Harmattan in your N900. If you like it, welcome,. If you don't, you still have the device and OS you paid for.

If you like Maemo 5, I believe it is your own interest that Nokia invests heavily in the MeeGo and its way forward. In the current context keeping a setting of Nokia alone pushing Maemo would have been more than risky.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

I think that a point made back in January, and apparently followed to a T by Nokia (and neglected here to some degree,) deserves to be reposted here.

LCA: How to destroy your community

Indeed, a LOT of them continued to be followed by Intel and Nokia now, with the start of MeeGo. I suppose a lot of people wandering in from the iPhone and Android world are used to such treatment, which is why all the irritation seems to come out here. Let me cite a few that I think exemplify the issues here:

#1 is to make the project depend as much as possible on difficult tools.
This, however, can be forgiven as the N900 has always been a geek target and the evolving tools for MeeGo seem to resolve some of the issues. But better tools are NEVER a problem and hard to use tools ALWAYS keep people away.

4: Project decisions should be made in closed-door meetings.
Which easily describes the entirety of the MeeGo design process to this point, as well as some Maemo processes that led to fiascos like PR1.2 taking forever. All of the design decisions regarding interfaces, UX/UI design, toolkits, etc. have been done behind the community's back. My comment above regarding iPhone and Android developers stands with respect to this, and is a key point of why Android Is Not Open (cf. GeneralAntilles.)

7: Governance obfuscation.
I think this has largely resulted due to the MeeGo migration. What, exactly, is the status of Maemo governance with the move to the aforementioned closed-door meetings surrounding the MeeGo migration?

9: Do not allow anybody outside the company to have commit access, ever.
I'm supposing this is the case, haven't heard of anyone in the community fixing and committing patches. This is absolutely the case for the numerous closed components. The release cycle as it stands certainly wouldn't encourage people to seek commit rights as it is.

quoting the last one in full:

10: Silence. Don't answer queries, don't say anything. A company which masters this technique may not need any of the others; it is the most effective community destroyer of them all.

Obviously Nokia has not yet mastered this one, as Quim is still here in the conversation and a couple others still float around, powerless though they appear to be.

And as for maemo.org, #2 applies to some degree.

So really, everything Nokia is doing (and the MeeGo project is adopting) is basically the worst possible moves to make with regards to a community. Taking that list SERIOUSLY for the warning that it is, would likely do wonders towards people's opinion of Nokia.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Then again,how many companies can you name a contributing as much fresh and competitive open source code than Nokia? Put things in perspective, please.

It's also a matter of timing and priorities. I haven't checked the status of Memory and LED Patterns applets in MeeGo but only this year Nokia has contributed to that project hundreds of thousands of LOC, plus the continuous development from their maintainers.