Here's my thoughts, whatever they may be worth to anyone here:

Community Council vote is supposedly coming up (I would REALLY prefer more public updates about council activities. New thread on the forums announcing each of the meetings on IRC, etc), and honestly, when we vote and such, the transformation of TMO/maemo.org community should be the forefront of both the community council members' platforms, and everyone's thoughts going into the election. IF we want to redefine the functions of the Community Council to something broader than serving as a negotiating point between community and Nokia, we need to have more directed discussion about what exactly we want to do, which currently is happening in a haphazard manner.

I am assuming everyone (who wants to keep Maemo support going past the Nokia plug-pull) thinks we want to EVENTUALLY create a new repository mirror for the Extras(-testing/-devel) repositories. Because if I recall correctly the schedule for the end of Nokia funding was end of 2012 (if I recall correctly from another post - readers, please don't assume I'm right until someone else verifies). This doesn't need to be done now, but we need to be ready for it BEFORE the plug pull, and if this is ever to happen, we need to start planning for it now - i.e. we need to vote to give the Community Council power to appropriate donations and to perform server renting, site administration, etc, on behalf of the community. If we do this, we also need to consider a demand for transparency - if donations get handled by the Council, we'll need to expect that we know what money is going where and how. IF we do that, in turn we need to think of some financial structure to the 'community' and the Council, in that the money should ideally not be stored in some community member's bank account, etc. We can either iron the details out beforehand, or grant the logistic-determining powers to the council as part of the vote that's coming up whenever, BUT if we do the latter, the transparency aspect should still apply - I.E council should have the power to make the plans but the plan should be gone over with the community publicly before being put in action.

I say the sooner we start setting up a mirror of all the extras repositories the better, because we'll have more time to iron out bugs with trying to get autobuilders set up and working.

Which brings me to the next main point... The binary blobs, particularly the non-freely-distributable ones. Now, Nokians have said in at least one bug-report (I believe it was about getbootstate, prob'ly a source code release request) comment that they have a policy that redistribution of closed binaries / modified scripts for the purpose of developing is accepted behavior in Nokia's eyes. Which means we can weasel around at an end-user level, hiding our own stashes of closed source blobs and out local image copies. But that's not user friendly at all.

Frankly, if we don't have a resolution to this, eventually Maemo 5 will indeed die, the slow and painful death of having users and developers find that their devices have some broken or missing package that they can't install. And then it's Cordia, MeeGo CE, or something else.

In my opinion, it is not impossible to recode enough of the closed source bits that we're no longer confined to Maemo 5's current kernel version (i.e. we'd need to focus on cloning the closed source parts that are compiled against a specific kernel), and start forward-porting Maemo 5's kernel to more recent kernel versions, and if we achieve THAT, then we can backport other open source packages or use the freely distributable closed source blobs from MeeGo. If we got until the end of 2012 to do it, I think it's possible if enough skilled community members work on it. Sadly people that skilled rarely care enough about a dying device, but I know they're around. On that note, we could authorize the Community Council to use raised funds for the hiring of particularly skilled programmers to write FOSS clones of some of the more difficult things. Personally though, I think if we have to resort to that it's probably not worth the expenditure, UNLESS we have a good chance of getting the entire thus 'freed' Maemo 5 onto other hardware.

I am very much of the opinion that Maemo 5+CSSU can coexist with MeeGo, and not only that, if Maemo 5+CSSU survives by the way mentioned above, it will be pulling open source code from MeeGo for a while. The two could then probably use the same drivers and tools for most ports to other hardware, etc.