@qole: It's easiest to understand the situation if you don't think of Nokia as one entity. I have little doubt that if the people working on Maemo were calling the shots we could get anything we wanted, but the issue is that *they* have to justify releasing closed source bits to *their* legal department. Then their legal department has to vet all of the request to make sure Nokia actually *does* own the IP rights to those pieces of software and that it doesn't have some other legal ramifications.

Now, *technically* we could just go ahead and cobble together a release using any Nokia closed source software we wanted to, but there are a couple good reasons why we won't. One of the big reasons is that it completely compromises our goals of working providing on a truly open source alternative distribution. This might also prevent people from being interested in contributing. I know *I* wouldn't contribute to something in such a questionable legal state. I can only imagine some others feel the same.

EDIT: I should emphasize as Stskeeps said further down, that they never asked us for justification. We asked you. We want to go with open source wherever it makes sense, so we want to find out specifically what functionality people care about the most.


-John