Wow, a thread on tmo that's actually worth reading and as of yet there are no reactionary opinions of no value. Hell must be freezing over

It is a difficult topic though, the lack of transparency in the name of corporate advantage is what ultimately ruins communities built around projects, I know that first hand from other ones.

They are not chucking the "corporate advantage" phrase out of the window with MeeGo, with all that "working in the open and fully open-source" mantra, are they? Of course not, they are corporations, there is no ideology behind them other than making money, they may believe that the open-source strategy will make them money, they don't "believe" in open-source, even if some of the people there really do.

And rightfully so, it wouldn't make any sense at all to tell people at Maemo Summit 2009 that e.g. "we are going to drop Maemo5 support after 4 or 5 updates anyway, because this MeeGo merger is coming, and Maemo6 is an instance of MeeGo, but they'll all have Qt4.6, so applications will work the same on all of them, although we are switching from the tried and true apt-get Debian package system to RPM, so scrap everything you've learned about packaging from the last 5 years and really..." and on and on and on.

Sharing information about future plans with users must be a pain in the *** for corporations. They don't want the competition to know ("corporate advantage") and they don't want to look stupid when they don't deliver as promised (we're still waiting for Flash 10.1) or the promised dates are unrealistic (portrait mode for the browser). If I was a corporation, I wouldn't share a damn thing with the users about future plans (the Apple strategy), you'll never look bad this way.

And we punish corporations for trying to be more transparent whenever a promised date slips or a promised feature doesn't go into production devices.

Now, if sharing future plans with the community is such a pain in the ***, who in their right mind is even going to consider including the community in the process of shaping those plans? This brainstorm thing? This is only a morale booster for the community, to make it feel like we have any influence at all.

True, we might have *some* influcence about *some* minor things, *if* we *all* mob together by voting on bugs in bugzilla, but that's it. I think we should be happy with what we have, as even this level of transparency and control for a big corporation is unprecedented. The community should come to terms with it, ultimately the vocal minority of people who complain the most had nothing of value to contribute, so if we lose them, so be it.