No, I don't want to restrict anything. I just want to be able to develop freely, without having to "jailbreak" and reverse-engineer stuff. For example, I wouldn't like Nokia to say that people hacking the device are criminals because they will help drug dealers and other criminals to make anonymous calls or whatever (Apple did this recently).

I don't care about how many users there are and how many applications will be available and if other people will be paying for it. I just want to be able to use my pariah software with no restrictions. I don't want to tell anybody what to do, and I don't want to be told what to do.

The chess club is open, but I don't care if the cheerleaders don't come in. I just want to play my chess (I don't even like chess that much, actually.)

As long as I can, for example, carelessly install Mer on it, and the price doesn't increase because of whatever software it comes with, I'll be buying NITs. If Nokia starts to create restrictions, I'll be angry, and will probably just continue to use it breaking these restrictions and wasting time with technological stunts that wouldn't be necessary if I could just use freely the equipment I bought.

Yeah, I might just jump from a cliff also.

I prefer the Nokia hardware. And the Maemo community as it is now is quite attractive to me.

I also invite you to go buy another device if you are not satisfied. Right now I am satisfied.

Me too!

The whole debate orbits this concept. But I think this can be just an illusion.

First, If Maemo and the NITs were so much endangered, would Nokia be releasing a new device right now? Is it still in a "let's put some money and see where this goes" phase?

And how many different devices does Nokia produce today? Are they all "mainstream"? I would love to hear the thoughts of Nokia people about that, if it's really "none or all", or if it is possible to go on selling multiple devices for the different 'niches'. Or better: build a device that is easy to fit for the needs of many different niches, which is the case here. The problem is that some niches require a flexibility that other niches dislike because it makes it easier to make illegal copies of proprietary software.

My question also.

I guess what people mean by 'niche' here is actually 'people who like dealing with Linux guts and also don't mind to have only few and beta-quality software available.' Some kind of electronic BDSM.

Will this 'niche' be unhappy if there are more users out there, and developers selling $.99 apps for this platform? Even if the apps are silly?? Not necessarily. Unless that means making the environment more restrictive. I wouldn't like that, and I guess the same goes for others in this 'niche'.

Myself, I mostly use my devices for im, e-mail, browse the talk.maemo.org page, listen to goth music, read RSS and download pr0n (lots of BDSM). No niche here. I also develop 'cutting edge' ( ) signal processing software, and I have a feeling the NITs are the products with the best cost-benefit ratio for all these needs of mine.

Let us play chess!!