I'm surprised by the defensive tone of Stskeeps in his initial post. He is one of the best guys around, picking some of the hottest potatoes few others even dare to touch and being constant on pushing the things he feels important even if they don't bring flashy short term results.

The principles and work he lead at Mer are now embodied in the MeeGo project, and Carsten holds his tiny but noticeable percentage of merit. I see why this is not evident for most people today, but the day MeeGo ships a full stack developed openly and released soon & often using an open build system this will be just self-evident. That day creating MeeGo reconstructed images for different types of hardware will be simple and doable in a way no Mer developer or tester could imagine happening any time soon, even less thanks to an official project pushed by Nokia itself and others in that league.

About opening Nokia proprietary components, there is a lot of source code seeing the light and again Carsten's work can take its own percentage of merit. The driver for this opening is mostly MeeGo and from there anybody can pull and improve that code for that or other purposes.

About the drivers, blaming Carsten about their performance is more or less like blaming Oprah because Obama is not delivering as expected. Still, he has probably done more for the drivers than Oprah for Obama's tough challenges.

And many more positive things. Dude, I'm still reading that first post with that tone and wondering what's going on. You are doing a lot of work that is interesting for several people. You're exposed, and in such situations you will always get congratulations and flames, with plenty of silent backing in between. Listen to criticism but don't be too obsessed about it, especially when your instincts and expertise tell you that you are doing quite well considering all the conditionants. You bet I have learned this not by reading it in a book.

Clear conclusion for Carsten and everybody: we are really happy funding his community work and will keep doing so without hesitation. He is working in pretty exciting stuff and it's everybody's interest to keep his motivations in good shape. If there are things you see that could be improved try asking him where could you help improving those things.