A significant day in community governance?
 

Well, now it is made public, after a brief period of secrecy, that - surprise! - MeeGo will refuse to host packages at meego.com from the individual developers and open source community that were asked, for the better part of a year to embrace and support Meego. Yes, you heard that right. The sad situation was rather unofficially described by lbt here:
http://wiki.meego.com/MeeGo_Apps/Problem_Statement

Unfortunately, the problem has not been succinctly stated and rather vaguely blamed on patents, so it is hard to address the possible solutions and effect. But it seems to a sucker punch to the kidneys. Some may be reminded of a debate perpetuated not long ago by those who had espoused the relative openness of MeeGo and encouraged maemo developers to leave Maemo for MeeGo:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=73896
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=114

In keeping with its tradition of openness, talk.maemo.org served as the forum for the debate, even including those individuals who ironically criticize the free-wheeling nature of talk.maemo.org. Most of council largely stayed out of the debate. But, in my opinion, the maemo p.o.v. and the worth of maemo and the need for uncompromising openness was rather ably argued by woody14619
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=104
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=148

MeeGo will take mobile linux to new places and should be supported for that. But dare to say that leaving nothing but corporate run app stores is an unnatural and unsustainable state of affairs for an open source project. The proposed alternative site (apps.formeego.com) seems to be a corporate-sponsored site from our own long lost friend, Nokia.

A maemo.org run by the community would never make such a decision. To maemo and other mobile linux developers, to those of you who support open source, those of you who have said maemo is dead, and those of you who have accepted "free" N950s - think carefully, think twice, and please continue to support maemo.org

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

that was one sad ,emotional and full of grief saying ,alas !
never mind ,people come back ,hold your positions again and support this community ,as we need you and we all will welcome you .be back soon !

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

... and here's to being open and free (as in speech). *raises pint*

With all its downsides (lack of 'traditional' support, slowly developing ecosystem, yadda yadda), the upside to be gained is illustrated clear as day here.

Go team.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

Repositories? I think Vasquez says it best:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7KAA-FSZho

Don't be Hudson:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsx2vdn7gpY

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

I don't know what to say. This clearly gives us that Nokia is not a partner anymore.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

So uh, where they gonna stick all teh meego appz?

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

slow isn't so bad. As long as it's always in a forward direction, you'll move faster than someone who sometimes goes in reverse.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

Wow... sad day, really. It's like a nail into the heart.
What does Intel have to say to that?

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

Hmm, this does really to be a sad and confused state of affairs from Nokia's PoV.

Let me get this right - They announce a new phone on a new platform, which relies on community apps, give/loan devices to developers to get those apps going, and then refuse to host them. If that is correct then how schizophrenic is Nokia?

I've been quiet envious of all the updated and new apps being announced, and been finally toying with the idea of dualbooting Meego to try them (assuming that they'll run on the CE edition).

Not sure it's worth it now. Meego/Harmattan seems to be an even bigger deadend than before.


I would love the developers to at least dual-release to Maemo/Meego-Harmattan so we can share the love and at least get some use and value out of the apps which people have slaved over.

I am eternally grateful for all the hard work put in by the Devs and others for maemo, and it's a sad day when they have been "poached" for a platform which is then set on fire by it's owner!

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

gazza_d, I can understand your frustration but this is a Linux Foundation decision. Also please understand Nokia does not own MeeGo

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

It's definitely a multi dimensional problem with no single 'right' answer... but at this point in a platform war, I equate the early phases as goldrush/landgrab where every gained user/developer will contribute to your camp and take one away from the competitor.. they'll fuel and propel your camp to grow further.

It costs more to convert a user that has already pledged their 'allegiance' to another camp, since they've already invested their time (setup, configuration, learning ui/ux..) and money (apps, services) to their current choice.

So... there are definitely advantages to being quick.

But yes, I agree with your point and I didn't mean to sidetrack the more important discussion of this thread.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

I never liked the idea of Meego very much. What I want in my phone is Debian or Ubuntu with whatever UX I choose (i.e. Cordia, Plasma Mobile, Meego UX).

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

There is not a problem with all the meego apps. The apps from corporations will still be accepted at meego.com. Apparently, it is the mere fact that an app is from an individual developer that will be the basis for its refusal. Nevermind that maemo.org has shown that there can be a effective QA process for such apps.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

Just a quick comment.

I think apps.formeego.org is a brilliant community-led recovery from an bad, ugly decision on the part of the Linux Foundation. Our "long lost friend" Nokia didn't create the situation, and they didn't choose the new domain name, but they are completely behind the community-led effort to get the infrastructure up and running without the expected LF hosting and support.

In the long run, I personally think the move to the non-corporate formeego.org site is a much better one, especially if Nokia puts the formeego.org repositories on the N9 like I expect them to do (and like they did with maemo.org).

When Nokia made the open-source community repositories available "out of the box" on the N900, it was a bold, wonderful step forward, away from the Official App Store approach of all the other mobile platforms. Everything I'm hearing from Quim and the community app team suggests that this will happen again on the N9.

I promise you, having the rug pulled from under the community repositories at this late stage of the game is even more frustrating to Nokia than it is to community developers, if not MORE SO.

The fact that the reasoning for this decision is so vague and secret suggests there may be more than a little corporate spite and politics mixed in here. But as always, we just can't know what's going on behind those curtains.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

And as for the (third-party) apps, whether corporate or individual, they are not going to be hosted at meego.com. Not a single one of them. That's the whole problem.

Corporate apps will be hosted in corporate app stores like Intel's AppUp and Nokia's Ovi Store. That was never an issue. What is an issue is that the little open source community apps, which were expecting to be hosted by the Linux Foundation, no longer have that assurance.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

"there may be more than a little corporate spite and politics mixed in here."

It was stated that this was not Nokia's decision. So what corporation would exert a spiteful and political influence?

And, while we're at it, who would feel spiteful and why?

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

Intel inside?

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

Sounds like they just trying to spite Nokia b/c there product would of been main benefactor of such repository's for time being.
I'm willing to gamble money that as soon as harmattan community apps have a home and N9 shipping as been and gone, there will be a massive U turn by who ever made original decision.
Just reading comments from some Intel employees over the passed few months shows what bitter childish ****s they are when it come's to Nokia and Harmattan.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

Yep, as I wrote on FMC, this will give us as a community more freedom on how to run the Apps service on long term.

But obviously the timing was still frustrating as everything was pretty much ready and done and now has to be transferred to new infra.

The patent situation across the Atlantic is looking worse day by day. I wonder if they'll have a software industry left in ten years...

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

I just wonder how Intel is responding to this bit of news.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

Out of the top of my head...

Nokia hosts MeeGo apps
Nokia goes bankrupt, or otherwise shuts down hosting for whatever reason
???????
Profit (for M$, at least)

Now, forgive me for sounding a tad too paranoid, or otherwise too negative... But considering Nokia's situation, I'd say that embracing a solution from them means, irrevocably, that a well-thought out backup plan should be ready to kick in at any time, otherwise chances are that they might drag a lot with them, when they go down...

Also, I'm not too convinced that Nokia's really interested in the well-being of MeeGo, after all that's going on. I'd take their offer with a bit more than a slight whole lot of caution. Much, much more...

Anyways, my two cents.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

also Nokia is more intrested in getting apps uploaded on ovi and that I COULD understand even if I disagree with the rest of the big mess going on at Nokia (and Intel)

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

I have to agree seems biggest mistake Nokia actually did was go meego and "discontinue" Maemo that infacts IS still is alive in form of Meego Harmattan. a closer look it still maemocore but qt instead of gtk.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

yes but what is your solution? Do you trust Intel on this? do you think they are intrested in this I doubt? so question is whats the alternative?

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

Well, the question works well on its head too... do you trust Nokia on this? Do you think they are interested in this? Based on their public statements, shifted funding and posturing, I doubt it.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

At least now the truth is coming out and the kind of truth people can relate too instead of all this closed shop talk.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

If I were Intel, I would make a stance in regards to offering the developers a "home" for their projects, their talk/discussions and push Intel AppUp as the way to go forward.

Nokia's finally found a way to sow disenfranchisement to even the most hardcore fan. The ambiguous blame on the patents - all without stating what they are... software patents, a potential lawsuit, something that we're not privy to yet... just way too convenient. It supports Elop's stance.

Does this apply to Maemo too? Nobody knows... yet.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

What good is AppUp to non intel products also any OEM that comes on board will want there own store. also most app stores will only allow certain licenses.
No corporate app store is the solution to Community OSS devs most wont go near them

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

I' get what you're saying, but I'm not sure that formeego.org will be good because it will be like maemo.org, version 2, is such a good argument.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

I think some here are confused and are blaming Nokia.

Really meego.com is owned by the Linux Foundation and... WTF? They are supposed to be the ones who always fight for Open Source and all that jazz.

Seriously!?

Let's face it the only 'ecosystem' (I hate using that word...it's become dirty) that MeeGo could possibly have at this point is the open source community one.

Otherwise what we're really going to end up with is A) Nokia Phones using Nokia's OVI store, B) Intel based phones using Intel's AppUp (which would likely be x86 based, so wouldn't work on ARM phones anyhow, of course I could be wrong on that) C) every one else... possibly also having their own store with their own 'Apps'.

So the community one could be the only truly multi-platform one that would work on ALL MeeGo phones (since with open source a simple recompile is usually all that's required going from ARM to x86 or the other way. Exception is usually emulators).

Linux Foundation, you have seriously made a ******ed manuevuer. And that's being mean to ******s.

slaapliedje

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

That's the thing... why was this "secret" until now? Isn't the Linux Foundation all about the open? What happened to "open"? Same for Nokia and Intel, both. What's with this lack of openness all-around? I'm pretty sure "saving face" isn't helping anything.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

I think some people in all of the groups deserve knuckles to the sack.

According to Wikipedia (yeah, so it MUST be true!);

"The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit consortium chartered to foster the growth of Linux."

This doesn't sound like it has to do with non-profit nor with fostering the growth of Linux.

This sounds like a flame war broke out somewhere along the lines of the Epic ones that Linus has said against Gnome and KDE.

Is the OBS hosted on meego.com at all? Or is that still on the OpenSuse servers?

slaapliedje

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

It was inevitable that once Elop got the position that Nokia would instantly withdraw from MeeGo, Maemo never stood a chance even !.

With Elop there is only one way = WP7, nothing else is in his vision and nothing else will ever be outside of WP7.

Nokia ceased to become our "friend" from that day on sadly.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

Yeah, exactly. This is really shameful behaviour by the "Guardians of Linux" themselves. Honestly, blocking a community open source app repository because of supposed potential legal issues? Seriously? WTF?!

We got a big presentation at the San Francisco conference from the guys building apps.meego.com and honestly it was one of the only bits of the conference that didn't feel like vaporware pie-in-the-sky or, even worse, like flies buzzing over a corpse. There was a real feeling of positive momentum there in that talk, like things were moving forward and the pieces were fitting into place.

According to the post by lbt, they were just as blindsided and frustrated by the nonsense as everyone else. And my sense is that Nokians were in a panic as well.

This is actually a very sad and worrisome development for open source. If the Linux Foundation itself, on the 20th anniversary of Linux, is this jittery, what's going to happen to the rest of the Open Source world?

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

You could not have said it better if you even tried !.

Sadly i have always thought long long time that "open source" is not the way of this greedy *****y world and would always be underminded by greedy people.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

That is exactly the way I see it. He's only interested un WP7, not even in Nokia.

He said it already: the n9 will be the only meego nokia device. ¿how could he said that?

What if the n9 becomes a huge success ? The n9 is not even being sold, and Elop already declared meego dead.

I love my n900 and I do really want to stay away from the iPhone or Android phone, but I think Nokia is forcing us to look somewhere else.

Sometimes I think that they want meego to fail miserably just to justify WP7.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

THEY should have been Elop ;)

Yes i fully agree your point.

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

God, I still remember when I used to complain during the N8x0 days about how Nokia is refusing to give into the community requests to open up more portions of Maemo so that we could have the bugs and security issues fixed ourselves... and I criticized saying HOW DARE Nokia puffer themselves up with compliments of openness when they don't give back to the community. The resoundingly loud shouts back at me were that Nokia *IS* very open and they were very proud of it.. and OPENNESS was more than open-source... it was also (get this): OPEN DEVELOPMENT!

The argument was that you could be involved, even if you couldn't see source code! You can file bug reports and see the status of bug fixes and get involved even in the closed-source by leveraging open development! A fat lot of good that did with all the WONTFIXES, FIXED IN FREMANTLE and other miscarriages along the way. Most of that was just repeated later (only with even LESS transparency in the so-called open-development) with Fremantle, and now Harmattan.

And now we get this repository hosting crisis out of nowhere that was kept secret from the communities it effects. Cripes! What's your bragging rights now, Nokia? Seriously--it's been no better than any of its competitors. Serious question: Why should I or any of the people I know or talk to consider this brand? Whats the advantage? What CAN you genuinely brag about doing well or better?

http://news.smarthouse.com.au/images...69_215x140.jpg

Re: A significant day in community governance?
 

the invention of snake 2???