Well, that's something I'm trying to do... at least for the "Harmattan" MeeGo.

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My personal opinion of what is currently wrong is that we currently have three mostly divergent (there's always exceptions!) communities.

- Mostly represented here we have the old and "Nokia-deprecated" Maemo community. It is the biggest one by far because there's actual, released devices involved.
- Mostly represented on the MeeGo MLs we have the "new" MeeGo community and the one we're supposed to "move into". But as it is now all I can get from MeeGo is a set of make-your-own-distro tools. Which are much better than Maemo's and fully OSS, but why would I be interested in them?
- And then, what should have been the main focus for quite a lot of people as it's what's going to be the visible part of the future Nokia device -- the Harmattan/DUI/MeegoTouch development community -- is quietly hidden under Gitorious, blogs and/or behind Nokia doors, and few people are monitoring it. Why? Why? It is THERE where I can sometimes smell the awful odour of closed source components approaching (but fortunately the picture seems generally better). And -- you're looking for the N900+1 GUI? It's right there in front of your eyes. Hint hint! Stop looking at MeeGo Netbook/Moblin screenshots.

And the sad truth is that so far instead of getting everything and everybody happily "merged" like Maemo mostly was we're distancing ourselves even more. And this won't look good. It will look like Android vs HTC. Does HTC care about being open? No, they just point fingers to Android and say "hey! we use that open stuff! we're open! buy our devices!" then laugh at you if you ask for the source of the crap they put on top the Android stack on their devices, and they will kick you if you ask where to file nasty hardware bugs. "Talking with the actual engineers behind the device? Madness! This it HTC!"

Haven't you already heard that sentence here? Some statements I've been reading lately have already felt to me like "hey! we use that open meego stuff! the N900+1 will be open!" "what about the notepad (or dial, or messages, or ...) application?" "closed! differentiation! but meego is open so go grab their generic Qt mail reader application that won't even integrate with the system theme because virtually no shipped device uses it. it's open! see -- here's the meego bugzilla, here's its repository, here's ..."


The other day I was reading a KDE guy blog and found that "MeeGo" was going to use some parts of the KDE calendar application. Which MeeGo was that guy talking about? Was he talking about the meego.com MeeGo? Was he talking about the Harmattan MeeGo? Fortunately, I googled a bit and found the answer (http://maemo.gitorious.org/extendedkcal/extendedkcal aka Harmattan) but the very fact that I had to ask this question made me think. Since then I've asked myself similar questions lots of times.


So, why are you expecting us to move "to MeeGo", considering the next device is still pretty much Harmattan?
See, when I arrived here, I had Joe Average's "make the most of the CURRENT DEVICE I OWN" mentality. Advancing to the "make the most of the NEXT device" mentality IS hard enough already, but I admit it has lots of benefits. And now we have to move to a "Make the most of the SECOND NEXT device" chain of thought? Talk about big ships turning around!

It still amazes me when users talk about Qt like if it had been this "device generation"'s decision. Guess again! The Qt-craze is happening right now because the NEXT device is the one that is all about the Qt-craze, and of course, it has nothing to do with the software the device you have in your hands right now runs, which is pretty much Gtk+ based. The MeeGo-craze device will be the next one after the Qt one. 2012? 2013?


Hopefully we'll see MeeGo as a true unifying layer by then. So far, I see no need to merge any communities as all this will cause is damage, and more confusion.
I can already envision asking a GUI development question on the meego-devel mailing list and getting two perfectly valid answers, one for "MeeGoMoblin" -- "link with libmoblinpanel.so" and the other one for "MeeGoHarmattan" -- "dbus-send org.meego.xxxx ... ".

Or was it "libmeegopanel" and "org.maemo.dui.xxxx"? I can't really remember. It has been so hard to cope with the _massive_ renaming done by both parties!