Case in point, for Maemo...

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9314

Relicensing reasons:

1. Fixing a bug: Positive, Might help fixing BME bugs
(https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6206)
2. Nurturing application development: none that I can see, except for
hardware hacks.
3. Spread of Maemo driven technologies to other platforms: Negative
4. Community maintenance: Positive, may help community maintence
5. Better architecture: Positive, userland process that covers a very
important component in the hardware interface

One or more projects: Mer, MeeGo, Gentoo, maybe even Maemo itself.

OK, so, conclusion:

To say it in a gentle way, BME is a can of worms. I will recommend against
reverse engineering it as this is not your grandfather's simple charging
algorithms and there is severe risk of blowing up things. There's a bunch of
patents and other things involved as well. While Nokia and Maemo may be happy
allow you to shoot yourself in the foot metaphorically, it may not be happy to
help injuring yourself physically

However, let us look at this in a practical way. The biggest issue currently
for all non-Maemo systems is redistributability of a very core component, the
charging and checks which without most OS'es actually would risk driving
battery below sane limits. I don't think this should be open source but I do
think we should be able to integrate it into our systems in a sane manner.

If there's bugs in BME, report them and let's see what we can do about them.
It's a critical enough component that we might be able to get bug fixing
support for the older devices too.

I'm proposing the following:

Priority MEDIUM since it's not a blocker, but I propose placing BME under a
license that allows binary redistribution and having that as goal. It's up for
discussion though if there's better ideas, keeping all the above in mind.

Just as an example... it was decided: we were protected from ourselves by Nokia from Nokia's own code (not a component manufacturer's). Now that the N900 has hit its end-of-life and Nokia is clearly no longer supporting or even responsible for anything anymore... we were left with the status of being denied and STILL dependent on the hope that bug reports will yield fixes and improvement from Nokia. Incredible. You can't even blame Texas Instruments or anyone else for this. Is there any way the Council can communicate to Nokia and cite these examples from the Wiki that I listed in my previous posts as the reasons why we would like them to finally, once and for all, just let Maemo go and open it up, for crying out loud?

The other work is important too (hosting repositories, etc.) but this one's a fight that has spanned YEARS and I'm not sure that anything else will matter without opening up as much of Maemo as possible (understanding that there probably will still be some that CAN'T be opened that doesn't fall into Nokia's permission to open).