Hi, I'm about to jump on a plane to Maemo Developer Days @ Copenhagen. Short answer and see you later.

https://publish.ovi.com/login

See the link "Publishing to Ovi discussion board on Forum Nokia". If you want to give direct feedback to Ovi as a developer that is the official channel for you. maemo.org is about community development, Forum Nokia concentrates in commercial developers.

"VAT / Tax ID" is a compulsory field in the registration form. What information did you put there?

Having a VAT / Tax ID is generally a good idea when doing business. In most countries it's cheap and easy to get one. And in most places the accounting gets complicated as your revenues grow, having to do basically nothing complicated for low incomes.

Some people are opposing "freelance" to "corporation". Let's not get lost in language and translation. Individuals can get a VAT / Tax ID and form a single person company. I have been a self-employed before joining Nokia, and it's not rocket science if you make your living out of it.

Now, in many places you simply can't start selling limonade inside a mall. The problem is less about accounting (if you make 1M you will have to justify that income no matter what) than about liabilities: what if you sell fake Fanta as genuine Fanta? what if you actually are making limonade out of industrial soap poisoning your customers? The mall wants to make sure that it won't be them having to cover your liabilities because you can't yourself. A VAT code implies a legal framework about your commercial activity.

The Maemo Devices team is discussing with the Ovi team about ways to accelerate the acceptance of individuals but, to be honest, our primary case are open source developers distributing free (as in beer and as in speech) software with liabilities defined in the license ("... AT YOUR OWN RISK", says the GPL and others).

I'm happy discussing here further about how to connect OSS developers to Ovi, now and in the future. If you want to lobby for a lower filter for low income commercial developers then Forum Nokia is the right place to propose and discuss.