Thread: Mer v0.7 release, and community firmware contents discussion
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Stskeeps is offline Stskeeps
2009-02-02 , 18:11
Posts: 1,671 | Thanked: 11,478 times | Joined on Jun 2008 @ Warsaw, Poland
#20
Originally Posted by qole View Post
Why are we being asked to justify every closed-source component? I would think it would be a more simple case than that; can we have the closed source bits for Mer? Yes? Thanks!
OK, I really have to defuse this one, sorry This is -me- asking, what we need to put our focus into looking at trying to make work in Mer. All Nokia has asked for, is a list[1]. No justifications, just what we think would be useful and what we would want to distribute, and to isolate early on as possible to see what would be possible to distribute, both of Nokia applications and 3rd party code.

They are doing us a huge favour through this opening, - allowing Mer on tablets to accelerate to Fremantle-level functionality so when Fremantle (and RX-51) comes out, N8x0(W) (and maybe even 770) will have quite similar functionality.

Why we're asking for reasoning, is to make it possible to prioritize our time in determining where it's even worth spending time on trying to integrating the closed source bits.

I say you build Mer using as few closed bits as possible, but without losing any functionality found in Diablo. After you've built the thing, tell Nokia what you've got in there, and they can argue with you over the stuff you've got.
Yes, we are. The closed bits stuff is added value to make it a more viable backport of Fremantle functionality, so people doesn't have to sacrifice functionality of their tablets. For my sake I could live with HW interfacing closed source bits, but some people are more picky

Anyone looking at the project can see that you're doing your best to find open source components wherever possible. So it seems kind of insulting to ask you to justify your need for each component. If there were good, easy-to-find open source replacements for these bits, wouldn't Nokia use them instead of developing closed-source versions?
The open source replacements question is to make us aware what things people would agree on would be good to include in base firmware images, or things that could be useful to spend time on integrating, - to see what people want and what they can live without.

Is Nokia worried that you could build a viable competitor to Maemo 5? They're afraid that they're handing you the weapons that will destroy them?
On the other hand, Mer might just be the thing that could make the Maemo platform a more viable platform, and an even more powerful and useful one to developers and users

[1] http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...ry/002946.html
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