Fremantle: easier to contribute?
 

Hello everybody.

Do you think it will be easier to contribute in Fremantel than Maemo Diablo?

Currently, for contributions to Maemo Diablo, We can only expose bugs by bugs.maemo.org, right?

garage.maemo.org serves only forge software for third-party Free software, right?

We must wait for the next Maemo to know what will be inside without being able to help, right?

There is no complete technical documentation on the internal workings of the free software Maemo for developer, right?


Maemo develops very differently from other distribution of GNU or Busybox based on Linux kernel.

Really differently from Ubuntu, Fedora or Debian. Too ...

Finally, this is what I saw. Have I bad saw?

And I am not alone in thinking this way:
http://mer-l-in.blogspot.com/2009/09...-or-is-it.html

Could we not, with the help of Nokia, improve this?

For exemple:
- Use garage.maemoe.org for all Free software projects of Maemo, Maemo including.
- Include Maemo Fremantle (and future versions) and all its Free components since projects in garages.maemo.org.
-Use garages.maemo.org for contributions to the Maemo OS project.
- That the community can develop the next verions of Maemo with Nokia.
- Uses elements of Launchpad or Launchpad in entire. (To simplify the translation, bug reports and reassembled the bugs and corrections to original projects.)- Have got a complete technical documentation on the internal workings of the free software Maemo for developer.
- Etc...

In short, that Maemo develops as develops Ubuntu or Debian.

Re: Fremantle: easier to contribute?
 

My question to you is how do you develop the entire OS entirely in the open (think Harmattan right now) without showing your competitiors exactly what you're doing?

When you can answer that, maybe then Nokia will develop everything in the open.

Re: Fremantle: easier to contribute?
 

Similarly to Ubuntu and Canonical.

Nokia sponsors and contributes to Maemo (like Canonical).
And Nokia makes money by selling equipment and services (like now).

(it's just an Idea)

Re: Fremantle: easier to contribute?
 

That doesn't answer the question of how you keep your competitors from knowing what you're up to if they can just look at Ubuntu or Maemo.

Re: Fremantle: easier to contribute?
 

In any case now Fremantle is fully public and in few weeks all the source code will be released together with the Maemo 5 final SDK.

In Harmattan we are trying to make a better separation between OSS and pearls to hide from the competition, so we can release soon and often without worrying about that.

Re: Fremantle: easier to contribute?
 

Also, lately, Nokia contributes to upstream projects more than previously (Bluez, Kernel, Tracker, Mozilla, etc.)

For example, the git repository for Bluez: http://git.kernel.org/?p=bluetooth/bluez.git;a=summary
Yes, there are commits from a guy called Johan Hedberg, guess where he works.

The point here is: contributing to these upstream projects, you're contributing to Maemo.

IMHO it would be a bad idea create garage projects for these projects.

About Nokia projects, there are git repositories for Modest and Hildon too. Hildon people have accepted some patches for Fremantle from Openismus people through of bugs.maemo.org. And I think Modest also have received some patches.

HAM has a git repository too (but there seems be little interest in contributing to this project, else some stuff from this should have been implemented yet).

Yes, I know they aren't going to use radical changes to those, but you always can fix bugs and write some patches (perhaps it's easier they accept a patch than Pidgin devs ;-))
Hopefully, more projects from Nokia use the git.maemo.org system and they are developed more openly in a close future.

Of course, lbt has a right point about co-development and discussion (when the process is in this stage) with the community.

So, is it easy contribute to Maemo? Well, IMHO it's not so difficult like it seems, but it isn't so easy like other projects.

Should Nokia be more open in this topic? Of course. Always it's possible be more open.

Re: Fremantle: easier to contribute?
 

The new category view was implemented by me, and submitted as a patch through Bugzilla. As was the "disable legaleses in red-pill mode option". mvo implemented the "move all packages not in a localised section to "Other" based on a design come up with the community.

In fact, HAM went through a phase where it was the most openly developed app - including discussion of specs and ideas on maemo-developers. But less so recently (since mvo moved off, perhaps).

Absolutely. I go back to my April 2008 post on the issue:

http://www.maemopeople.org/index.php..._org_what_next

Fortunately, with Fremantle the bar has finally been raised for third party application developers, with the feel of the default UI being "mainstream" not "Gtk+ with some themeing".

Re: Fremantle: easier to contribute?
 

Can you move this thread to Community, please? (or Development if you wish)

The intention in Maemo Devices is to follow the example of http://qt.gitorious.org . It won't happen overnight nor at once, but that is the goal.

Re: Fremantle: easier to contribute?
 

That is good to hear Quim!

I had hoped (and frankly, having listened to all the positive developments in Maemo, expected) that Maemo would move in this direction.

Of course, it is great to hear it confirmed.

@korbé when I wrote that piece I was thinking about how Mer and other OSes did this collaborative work.

I see the Qt-maemo group leading the way here (there may be others I don't see) and as an example of community integration I have been able to ask the team to strive for a core maemo-Qt to ease support for Mer and pre-N900 owners.

This means that Qt-fremantle *should* use the same source code as Qt-mer (and Qt-diablo) with bits turned on/off according to HW support.

Re: Fremantle: easier to contribute?
 

@zerojay

I think it is important to realise that whilst it can be argued that frameworks do give some competitive advantage in the early days, opening them up and innovating on new areas allows you to stretch your legs and allow the framework to enter maintenance mode.

There's a lot to be said for OSS allowing forward thinking companies to focus their efforts on the innovation segment whilst allowing others to take the maintenance and support road.