The main thrust of my post was nothing to do with Ubuntu, the line about them was an afterthought edited in.

As others (I think it was qwazix) have said here on TMO, maemo itself is a bit of a mess with its tangled dependencies, but what the team did with those 5 devices (ok 6 with the unsold n950) is allow others to use their work by pushing stuff upstream, and then the Meego move happened which facilitated others to continue their work even when Nokia and Intel shifted their focus elsewhere. 5 devices! How many have Google made, and how much financial muscle do they have?


I was tempted by the Edge, and probably would've got the $600 deal on Tuesday, but they'd gone by then, and I can't justify spending the extra money just now. I've already made a commitment to buy the Jolla device, and a mental one for Vivaldi, so in the end the Edge would be a device too many for me. I'll probably give them a donation anyway if it helps them over the line, as I do want Linux devices to take hold in the mobile space.

The Phoronix article mikecomputing linked referred to this blog by Matthew Garrett, on the constraints a CLA has when combined with GPLv3 . And here is a list of software that they require contributors to sign a CLA for.