Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

What should maemo.org and the Maemo Community look like in six months? What are the top priorities of the Maemo project? What should the maemo.org staff be concentrating on?

At the Maemo community meeting yesterday, it was agreed that we need to set some bigger, more concrete and measurable goals for Maemo for the coming months. We decided to re-run a one-week brainstorming session, similar to the one in 2008, to set some near-term direction and priorities for the Maemo project.

To run the brainstorm, we are going to gather ideas here in Talk, in a number of threads created for the purpose. The threads will start [Brainstorm 2010], followed by an area of Maemo to discuss, and will each be dedicated to a specific area of the Maemo project.

Update:
Here are links to the individual threads that made up the brainstorm. Please feel free to continue discussions there, or in the relevant wiki pages.

• [Brainstorm 2010] Bugzilla
• [Brainstorm 2010] Community workings
• [Brainstorm 2010] Downloads
• [Brainstorm 2010] Garage and developer services
• [Brainstorm 2010] News and Planet
• [Brainstorm 2010] Packages
• [Brainstorm 2010] Talk and mailing lists
• [Brainstorm 2010] Wiki

Ideas generated from the brainstorming session will be gathered in the wiki.

Join in, help decide what Maemo will look like six months from now!

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

We need to make it clear this is not associated with the Brainstorm tool/process here. This effort is being coordinated in the threads here under Community and on corresponding wiki pages.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

Dave, are we talking about Maemo here or MeeGo?

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

Maemo only.

-not Dave

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

Thanks, posted mine.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

One big improvement would be for Nokia to communicate in some kind of official capacity.

I think many people here feel a bit abandoned by Nokia.

A couple of examples:.
(1) the long silence of PR 1.2.
We know it is delayed but a little more information would help.

(2) Also reassurances about the relevance of maemo compared with MeeGo.

Even some kind of communication in the weekly newsletter will help or maybe a dedicated thread where Nokia "officials" can post announcements.

I think this reluctance to communicate is hurting the community and beginning to turn some people away from Nokia products.

I think some mechanism for "formal" communication by Nokia is needed. It would feel like the community is more engaged with the company and feel like we actually matter.

Nokia is one of the few manufacturers in Europe that can challenge the USA in the IT sector.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

Is this more of a "We'll have to change something, if you want to be part of the change: This is your last chance to be heard"? Or is it a "We don't know if we'll have to change things at all; any suggestions?"?

Apart from one single issue (testing packages) which I'll try to comment upon, I'm very comfortable with the way the community works ATM. - I'm just not sure if I need to put a "Please leave things as they are" into each thread or if not posting at all will be counted as just that (instead of as "Benny doesn't care", which wouldn't be correct).

Does my question make any sense?

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

It's "help decide what makes sense, what gets high priority".

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

As much as I like the N900 and Maemo (and with the full knowledge that I bought a little computer and not just a phone), I would like to see the phone be a little easier to use. I sometimes feel like simple things like dialing, accessing the keypad for phone menus, answering, and even speed dialing takes too many keypresses or is buried under too many menus.

I also have a little confusion as to the location of the public directories. When I connect via USB and copy files over, when I copy files to the device via bluetooth, and when I ssh into the device, I seem to go to different (and, apparently, hidden) directories. Those should be more standardized and easier to find.

Also, it is too easy to accidentally turn the thing off from the security keypad...if you hit outside the keypad dialog, it asks you if you want to turn it off. Once a month or so, it gets turned off by bouncing around in the car or my pocket through the right combination of hits.

I am expecting a number of issues (such as the ability to respond to meeting requests) to be resolved in 1.2, and others (such as the lack of indicators for missed calls and messages) have been addressed well by the community. Still, I wouldn't mind seeing more of the basic features and indicators that I have always had on previous phones.

I would also like to see a few more standardized, good-looking, finger-friendly input methods that we could use in apps (presumably Qt stuff). Flickable numeric entry, date entry, and list selections that don't force open a new window would help us write some useable and good looking apps. If fancy inputs and numeric displays were available for me to use in python, but were written in native libraries, we should be able to use them without performance problems. And different apps would work in a more uniform fashion.

I hope that is the kind of thing you are looking for. And don't get me wrong...I think you have done a great job with this gizmo. I just want you to keep making it better.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

Neither.

It's the 100 Days: Part Deuce.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

Actually, this brainstorming process is about the maemo.org community and *.maemo.org web sites, not Maemo the software or Maemo the division at Nokia that made the N900. So, your post is a bit off topic for this discussion.

Still, it was thoughtful and well written, and I hope you will continue to provide feedback to Nokia. You can certainly post such ideas in threads on this forum, but you may also want to take advantage of the official Nokia forum and the Nokia Care phone line. They are official product feedback channels to Nokia, while this forum is just visited by a few Nokia employees on their own time.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

Made these Sticky by request.

Gadsby, is there any way to force some order here? Like make this thread the top one?

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

Very specifically Maemo

Dave.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

Hi,

Speaking only for myself...

To me it's a "No-one is telling me what to do, and setting my own agenda with no feedback or big-picture thinking is getting old" thing.

Maemo exists, and will become a mostly 100% volunteer effort to provide software for older devices once MeeGo 1.0 for the handsets comes out. Given that, it'd be useful to know what people expect Maemo to provide in terms of services, and what efforts are needed from the community, to keep things on the tracks, once Maemo goes into maintenance mode in Nokia.

Dave.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

In fact, very specifically maemo.org

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

The main channel for "formal" communication from Nokia is http://conversations.nokia.com/ . I try to complement here when needed, and when there are actually "formal" things to say.

Your post is very interesting and I'm happy discussing this further in an own thread, since it's not really related to this Brainstorm.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

With the arrival of a n900 installable MeeGo or with the replacement of the n900 by a new MeeGo phone, the maemo history will probably end if things continue the way they are today. Imho MeeGo will not have the hildon libraries (but it will in fact come with gtk), so most of todays maemo software will not compile nor run on MeeGo.

In this context i'd like to see one of the following things:

* Maemo5 final running on 3rd party hardware (Beagleboard, Touch Book) as a basis of community based Maemo devices, or
* a usable version of Mer able to run todays Maemo apps
* In this context: Nokia releasing either the source code of the closed source core components or at least Nokia giving the permission to redistribute the closed source components as part of a 3rd party Maemo5 or Mer image/device/whatever

I really think either the next half year will show a possibility to build community developed Maemo units or this entire discussion is rather futile.

Or somone will port all the hildon libs to MeeGo and current Maemo apps will be able to run on MeeGo, then Maemo might indeed just fade away with nobody really missing it ...

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

Funny, I said what I meant, so perhaps we disagree on the scope? For me we're talking about more than web infrastructure, we're talking about a self-sustainable community & project.

Dave.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

We don't want you to tell us the exact date and time of PR 1.2 Release. We only want you to give us a rough estimate of when it'll be released.

That is it.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

I think this is a bad idea. While opening all the discarded Maemo code could be cool, it would be a waste of resources and time.

MeeGo is ultra-portable as well and is designed for any sort of hardware

However, I do think we should look into what you say here:
Hildon and Maemo GTK+ is fading into community maintenance and we knew this already. Can I motivate you to be starting a discussion on meego-dev on how we can be using libhildon in a MeeGo context?

I -think- it's possible, but Maemo GTK+ is a tough camel to shallow in order to get a full Hildon API. And since all apps have to be repackaged anyway, we can maybe do something smarter this time around.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

The website, shirts and stickers of this community have a logo that says "maemo.org". We are talking about the same scope, no worries. Let's continue with the beef of the discussions.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

It's back to that pesky disagreement of definitions, Dave. Shall we just say "Maemo Community" and call it a day?

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

No, the dark magic employed by vBulletin in deciding which sticky appears topmost is beyond my ken.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

I am surprised. Why do you now have this opinion? How is it a waste? The community will no longer be blocked by closed components or dependent on Nokia.

There is still much that is unknown about MeeGo. Best not for Maemo to rely upon it yet for all our future hopes.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

Because most of what's left is either useless, easily replaced or both, and the time required to open them is non-trivial and better spent elsewhere.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

You didn't answer the questions of "why" and "how" - just repeated the assertion.

It's a sad commentary when prominent maemo community members begin to summarily advocate against opening maemo. And may I point out that there is this often repeated behavior of soliciting suggestions, but then quickly dismissing out of hand if you don't agree with them.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

Please keep my statements in context what Master of Gizmo was advocating. If one of the arguments were was to provide a maemo.org provided platform that is ported to a lot of different devices, I highly doubt I'd get through with asking for it.

There's already a lot of trademark dillution with the chinese devices running the Diablo deriative for instance.

I believe in focused open sourcing, what is needed. It would take several man months to walk through all of the open source without uncertain benefit in the long term.

I would rather prioritize opening up components that are hardware essential or getting them ported to MeeGo (telephony stack, battery management, etc etc).

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

I can't speak for Carsten on why he's changed his opinion (although I don't, in fact, believe he has). As for the how, well, I did answer it. It's a waste because the code that would be open sourced is either useless, easily replaced or both. As Carsten says, opening it up is a big time investment, so if the benefit is less than that time investment, how is it a good idea to invest that time. Especially as it can easily be spent elsewhere on things which actually do provide a net benefit.

If this is what you believe the position is, then I don't think I'm going to have much success in dissuading you.

Not all suggestions are good suggestions, and Nokia isn't always the evil-company-that-does-things-for-no-good-reason many people here make it out to be.

A little intellectual honest from everybody involved would go a long way. :)

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

I haven't changed my mind. With MeeGo, Nokia has done exactly what we wanted them to do, a fully open source mobile platform governed by good open source principles (differentiation, hardware blobs excluded). The primary strength should go into opening components that strenghten this platform, as we can all go home if MeeGo fails.

I am against insisting all of Maemo legacy should be open sourced. I am for open sourcing bits where there is a direct benefit to the effort spent - no matter the target (Diablo community SSU, MeeGo or even Gentoo on 770). What I'm trying to say is the exact same thing as exists already with the open sourcing queue - help prioritising licensing change requests with good reasons we need higher. We'd be stuck in a chaos where valuable and valid change requests would be delayed forever otherwise.

There is nothing more sad for me than seeing licensing changes being met with the sound of crickets. Open source goes both ways - it isn't just about taking. It is about contribution back too.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

Sorry, I fell for SD69's false premise there. I didn't mean to imply you had changed your position. ;)

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

It remains to be seen if MeeGo lives up to the billing...

Ahh, emphasis on "all" - understood now. I trust you realize from our previous conversations that my questions were literal and asked in good faith.

Sad indeed.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

There have been plenty of requests to open code in bugzilla and elsewhere where the benefit of doing so has been indicated. The entire N8x0 community suffers from the lack of opening any of the code after it became legacy. You said "most" is useless or easily replaced, but some is not. If all of it can't be opened, the parts of it that are not useless or easily replaced could.

Nobody here said Nokia is an evil company that does things for no good reason. And then you imply intellectual dishonesty! Back to your old habits I see.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

Exactly why I said most, nobody's position is held in terms of absolutes

Mmm, yeah, I wasn't addressing you personally. People here do make that claim, and you bringing up your opinions about suggestion "handling" certainly doesn't limit things to this thread, so I'm not sure what your point is here.

Either way, can we avoid making it personal? :)

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

Sure. All good.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

If someone needs a Nokia closed component to become open please use the existing process Carsten has in place: http://wiki.maemo.org/Open_developme...hange_requests

We have opened many components this year, comprising 100k's lines of code (haven't counted them: a lot). There is still more in the pipeline, all of it to be contributed to the MeeGo project.

If you are still missing a specific component, please follow the process.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

We're talking Maemo here, not Meego.

According to the bottom of this, Nokia has not opened opened any Maemo components in a long, long, time - not even in EOL circumstances:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Why_the_closed_packages

I would love to see it updated with positive developments.

And of the "Requests Already Considered", all but one has been denied (and the one was a special circumstance).

So peope are understandably dubious that future results for opening Maemo components will not be different than the historical results.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

What is the time period for this effort? Is it ongoing, or is there a set end date for this brainstorming project? I have a vague (false?) memory of the brainstorming during being set at just a few, short weeks, but I don't see anything about a schedule in the thread starter or the wiki, and there's nothing more recent than September 2009 in #maemo-meeting IRC logs.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

It finished (whilst I was on holiday). There was a prioritisation meeting (whilst I was on holiday). The results were minuted.

What we haven't had, though, and I'll chase up on this: plans from the stakeholders as to how & when they'll deliver them; clearer communication about it through the council blog.

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

Chased up: http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...ne/004345.html

Once there's a unified plan (say a bit more like http://wiki.meego.com/Release_Engineering/Plans/1.1) I'll make sure that's communicated through the council blog (and so syndicated to all the places it's syndicated).

Re: Announcing the Maemo Brainstorm 2010
 

Do we think we can go ahead and unsticky the threads then?