A few small reflections from someone with a bit of experience in repentance and forgiveness.

What we have here is a clash of cultures. While most human beings seem to have a general sense of 'right and wrong' the specifics of 'how wrong' something is are highly culture dependent. To give you an example, a small African tribe somewhere was converted to Christianty by visiting missionaries. A few years later, they were found to be still practising their Christian ethic, taking very litle notice at all of sexual promiscuity while executing anyone who expressed any sort of Anger, as that was a deadly sin - which rather set them at odds with the ethic of either catholic or evangelical Christianity.

maemo.org is historically part of the FOSS system, with FOSS ethics. To the people who have invested in that, what SIO2 has done is a huge outrage, undermining the QA process for personal gain. We need to hear that sense of outrage. But we now have a growing number of people drawn from a more capitalist environment for whom exploiting a loophole for personal purposes is a minor peccadillo, unless you're a Brithish MP. What has happened here is a very specific example of that culture clash.

Given that Maemo.org is a FOSS system, SIO2 might be compared to a traveller in a foreign country: well advised to learn the local ethics and abide by them. You don't deal drugs in China if you value your life. You don't steal in Baghdad if you value your hands. You don't have sex on a beach in Dubai if you value... you get the idea.

SIO2 didn't research what was acceptable, and he got caught out. So what do you do then? If you are wise, you throw up your hands and say "I'm sorry - I didn't realise it was such a big deal for you guys. How do I make amends?" If SIO2 had done that, this thread would have withered at about page 3. What you don't do is try to justify yourself by arguing that your ethics is probably better than the local one anyway.

Which brings us to where we are now. Sadly, SIO2 appears to have thrown his toys out and gone off in a huff. That's a shame, as he could have contributed much, if he'd been willing to adapt to the local conditions. He needs to get off his high horse. But so does everyone else. Your ethical values are exactly right... for you. And no-one is suggesting (I hope) that maemo.org loses that FOSS ethos of integrity, honesty and generosity. But there are capitalists out there who feel very differently, and we have to work with them (and possibly more so as we move into MeeGo). And there are more and more of them arriving here having bought devices not because they appreciated the FOSS approach so much as because there are now some damned good devices. The people saying "What he did wasn't so bad" are the very people who want to purchase paid apps (as they can for the very capitalist iphone) in a free market.

The best we can do now is a 'Learning from experience'. This is going to happen again. Maemo is now mainstream, and not everyone involved is going to share the FOSS values. Certainly we can tighten up our QA systems to allow that not everyone will use them with the same approach as the locals. But we might also want to look at our 'discipline' systems. SIO2 certainly needed a dressing down, and a stern injuction that "That ain't how we do things round here". His apps needed to be pulled and made to go through the system properly. But neither of those things needed to be done publically. If we had had a system that said "If you believe an abuse is happening, please report it confidentially to the appropriate people" (in this case the downloads or testing teams) the whole thing could have been managed without the pitchforks. SIO2 might still have decided to leave, but we would have had a lot less drama, and could have felt at the end we'd handled it in a professional manner.

Right now, everyone has lost. Can we learn from it please?