Hurray, that's 555 votes. That makes, in my experience, about 5-10 people willing to put their money where their mouth is. So, what, 20 bucks a person, that's 100-200 bucks.

A good programmer has in the range of 3-5K a month, I'm going to include less-than-fortunate instances here. So, 4K, divided by 20 days (working), 200 a day?

So this community has the aggregated force to hire a programmer for half a day, most likely.

Unless you want a button moved 3 pixels to the left, this is going nowhere. If you want stuff accomplished, you need to push. Crying in a corner isn't going anywhere. It will definitely not budge Nokia.

So let's get this poll restarted. We'll have No, Yes, and Yes, and I am willing to do something about it. Code, fund, get involved in a meaningful manner (and I don't mean wiki edits). Then we count votes.

That's why we can't have anything nice. Damn the phone app. If developers would be motivated, most closed components would have been rewritten by now. We already have a lot of fixes, new Media Player (or use a better player), better camera (Fcamera or the camera-ui2), modified menus or replacements. As for Maps, even if open it would still have to use Nokia servers.

So Phone will be left behind. Maybe a few others. So what. That's not what kills a platform. Nor an excellent device.

What kills a platform is running out of juice and we're running on vapors.

So what if Maemo was suddenly open right now? We'd get a few fixes, a few updates. Still few to none games, still unpolished interface (we needs designers for that, not OSS), still nowhere near the app base of other OSs, and still we would lose ground at an astonishing pace because even with contributions we will be woefully outdated. Android has a Google V8 behind it, WP has a Microsoft V10, and we would be paddling with homemade cardboard box-sides.

It's not like we have a short to-do list and it's all hung on closed source. We have a to-do list the size of China and MAG is pretty tired.

Yes I know I'm ranting. It just makes my pressure go up seeing how I can't really use my Android replacement to anything nice until I shell out cash to someone and frankly, I'd rather give it to someone here.

For all the effort spent here, get organized. Open up a competition, start gathering pledges, and make the pot go to the winner. Use a small amount, so more people would join. Open a forum for the competition, use threads for voting, announcing winners, gather feedback.

I'll start. If this gets off the ground, I'll add 10 to each contest, next 3 contests for starters. Surely someone else here can spare a ten. We'll get the pot rolling - there has to be someone who wants to help and get a few beers out of it.

Anyone trustworthy here has a premium PayPal so donations can be centralized?