But who said it is not profitable enough already to sustain itself?

And why does a "niche" has always to be considered some naïve dream? Why is it considered an inherent waste of time for big companies? Hey, with the mass mainstream market saturated with iPhones, it might perhaps be easier and more profitable for Nokia to take some niche than just focus on that larger and more difficult fight. You must choose your battles to survive the war!...

I won't doubt it if you tell me the NITs are not much profitable yet. And I bet they aren't profitable enough to award yachts and mansions to all Nokia executives and shareholders. But do we know for a fact if they are "wasting" money in Maemo right now, and they would have to make drastic changes in the project because of this?

Maybe this feeling that we currently have to do something or else Memo and the NIT will fail is totally artificial. Maybe we are conditioned to think that closed source is right and open source is inherently some impossible naïve dream because it is so beautiful. But I question this idea.

This is questionable by itself, but in the NITs case is even worse. It is difficult to see how a software company can make money with free software, but Nokia is not only a software company, hardware is quite important to them. Maybe Maemo is profitable enough right not as it is because the company is making enough money with the hardware (they say it sold more than they imagined). If this is the case, we should not be worried about making some extra effort to grow its user base "or else".

Maybe it's not the case, maybe Maemo will in fact fail unless we are successful in making it mainstream. But how do we know that? It makes no sense to just be admired with the number of iPhone users and developers and be afraid to be smashed by it somehow.

Why can't we just be happy with the way we are, this small little happy sustainable and profitable niche? Why do we have to be concerned about reaching the stars and rivaling the iPhone? Why become something else entirely?? Are we thinking about what we want for us in our lives, or are we seeking fame an glory and hordes of mindless fanboys to be part of our gang? If it's profitable enough already (perhaps the release of a fourth table is a proof of that), why do we care if our neighbors and Aunt Tille uses it or not? What do we care what other people think?

As for Nokia, I imagine they would in fact like to take a bite out of the Apple pie. But we can't know what they plan. They probably wish Maemo becomes good enough to beat Android and w1dowze in the consumer's minds. But it's up to Nokia to take steps in this direction, and not us. Or do we believe the tablets are so bad right now that all it users are in the verge of migrating to other devices?

It's Nokia's call to make a decision like: "Maemo is not making enough money as it is, let's just make some iPhone clone instead." We, the Maemo community, shouldn't care much about this, we shouldn't raise the subject from nothing. Unless Nokia comes top-down with some news like this, it makes no sense for us to be arguing about what we should do to suddenly "take the mainstream" (like Linux will one day "take the desktop")

Now, don't think I am saying it's all perfect right now. I do agree there are some deficiencies in the Maemo community right now that should be fixed. Somebody suggested in this or another thread that we might pick up some ideas in how Debian and other distros work in managing their packages. That is a very good idea. The Maemo garage right now is just some kind of Freshmeat, and not at all like Debian where there is a project leader et cetera. This sure is lacking in Maemo. It doesn't feel like a distro right now, but more like "a mere bag of packages"...

This may be because we see Nokia as leading Maemo, but nobody would like to "work for free" for Nokia, following project manager's decisions like in Debian and others. Perhaps we will see this kind of stronger organization build up around Mer? Who knows...

And I am not against Nokia hiring someone to make a number of applications for NIT users to buy. I don't mind if Microzoft releases "Maemo Office". I only hope we can always opt out such things, and that counter-piracy concerns doesn't end up making life a hell.

Sorry again for long post. It's Friday night and just had a few drinks!. I thought a lot about the subject because I was reading the thread at the bar, with my tablet you know...