I agree with you in principle. BUT ... if we take the Zaurus as an example. There we have a small community, fragmented, with a few egos getting in the way a bit. There are several main distributions - the stock installation from Sharp which was stable but crap, Cacko, which was a tweaking exercise based on the Sharp distro and was a vast improvement. But Anton moved on and its no longer updated.

The OpenZaurus folks always wanted to be bleading edge, and as a result it was never stable out of the box, and took a lot of effort to get to a workable state.

Then, along came pdaxrom. It was a one man show, and he would allow no-one to help. Although things have been opened up a bit in the last year, by the time a useful distro was produced, the Zaurus was discontinued.

Don't get me wrong ... I have the highest regard for everyone involved in the Zaurus community. My argument here is that because each of these groups decided to do their own thing, rather than finding a way to work together, less progress was made in the longer term. (In fact the OpenZaurus guys started the OpenEmbedded effort for this very reason, in an effort to increase the size of the developer community by creating a build system which gave them the ability to build software easily for many different platforms)

When the community is small, I believe we do not have the luxury to sit in our own little silos, only doing the things we want to do rather than seeing the bigger picture.

I don't know if its possible to get people to work in any other way when they are volunteering their time for free. But it seems to me that between Nokia and ourselves, we should agree a clear roadmap for the product, and some kind of concerted effort to move the thing in a direction that suits most people.

That's what I would like to see.

And I would also like to see the non developers here, like myself, contributing in other ways. Documentation, project management, application testing ... there are many ways folks can help out.