I have my mapping utility (zmapper) which I'm trying to get to work with Kismet and it does load and run for being alpha quality (based off my Zaurus program, it uses Qt). It isn't up on Maemo, but that is part of the problem - I can get it into the garage, but not into any main repository. And I also have been posting the source archives at the same time. (And I think the original complaint comes from someone who said it took effort to package a .deb file).

The app installer is horrendous - it takes minutes to do an update of its repositories (even if unnecessary). And it displays the whole version string so I have several pages of oss|1.x where oss is short for osso-something. They supposedly have fixed that for the next release.

But pray tell where can I get Kismet or anything like it for a stock iPhone? Oh, I can't. Or the iPod touch. Or video. The really old ones will run linux, but don't have all the cool hardware. I can try registering for the developer program. I know, it will be wonderful in a few months (start singing, "The apps will come out, tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar, there'll be apps". Can I play ogg files? Doom? For that matter, browse to my favorite podcast sites and download the MP3s to the music library? Download (not merely browse) images? Video? Maybe all that will come or Apple will lock it out.

If you limited the Nokia as much as the iP*o* it could have lots of great applications too. They too would all be silos and rarely talk to each other as well (thus avoiding annoying bugs when programs have to work together).

Forks are wonderful, as long as you don't want soup.

We will see if the developers come up with anything useful - you can't even use the existing devkit on your existing phone if you aren't one of the higher levels of membership.

I think Nokia should get more serious about supporting the open source part of things. They are falling into the trap in thinking because they provide a website/repository everything will just work. But at least I can get things running for the platform without hacking the platform. And some information is available (So, how DO I turn on the GPS and gpsd? Some magic dbus incantation? - at least I've seen some things, I've no idea about anything on the iP*o*)

One problem I have is Maemo is for grand projects so has a lot of sections which are hard to maintain properly or use. I just ported "sox" so I could play a few files simply (for kismet). It is up at my site, not Maemo because I'm not going to bother with a full project. I might move my zmapper stuff there when I have time to play webmaster.

I think Maemo needs something more like a wiki than sourceforge - where I and others could just drop "ports in progress" and have them fixed and picked up by others if they want to fix something.

And the developers at the garage aren't as good about posting their sources - I have trouble finding GNUMeric in .deb form, and haven't found the source archives or I would already have patches or fixes or enhancements.

The platform is very good out of the box, and only gets better because I can extend and enhance it easily - maybe not as easily as one or two clicks, but there is a lot of stuff not on my Macintosh powerbook because there is no way to get it to work (challenge - create a virtual serial port - something that Google Earth or other closed mapping program could recognize as a serial port for a GPS NMEA stream, but takes data from a TCP (or UDP) port. I have all the dev docs, yet I've not attempted it).