File this under: "We don't know what we got 'till it's gone"...

It is the community, we are the community, and for good or ill, this community is greater than the sum total of all it's parts. Because of that, removing one "ill" part may in fact have the unintended consequence of actually reducing the total "good" that this community provides.

I participate in one of the threads fatalsaint speaks of, and it is wonderful thing. In that thread I am seeing development of an app occur in real time on this forum with input and feedback contributed from around the world. Not in IRC or over mailing lists but in this forum, one post at a time.

Thank you for using these boards fatalsaint. This is how some have envisioned this forum all along. It is also what I believe is this forums future.

Thank you also to the folks who stayed out of that thread because they didn't have anything positive to contribute. It allowed the posts in that thread to be as productive as they could be and kept the thread on task. I look forward to incremental improvements in that app every day.

I also participate in one of, if not the most nonsensical of all threads found in these forums. I initially did so months and pages after that thread first appeared because I felt some of the same frustrations that Sopwith seemed to identify with in his opening. These frustrations as well as seeing that dang thread pop up in "New Posts" every other day eventually caused me to snap.

I posted a rather terse reply directed at the creator of that nonsense thread and I wasn't particularly proud of one of the statements I made. It was quite rude and it went over like a lead balloon. That thread kind of died and I felt my post killed it... That is until Danramos posted a reply.

Thank you Dan! Your ability to inject humor into a situation where I was certainly ashamed of my response, was like a breath of fresh air. The cloud of guilt over my head lifted as that thread became a humorous satire of it's own dang self. I also now look forward to seeing that thread pop up from time to time because of the entertainment it now provides.

A community needs to be productive and provide enjoyment for those participating. We also can not shy away from saying the things that sometimes need to be said. However, once that bell has been rung, continuing to ring it is not so enjoyable to others. Regardless of the tone it sounds.

A community also needs to grow but Ah, there is the rub. How can it grow if Maemo is "dead"?

For one thing the devices aren't dead. Not by a long shot. The 770 evolved into a portable network management tool. The N800/10's are evolving into handy portable devices that run many alternative OS's with most of the hardware capabilities that more modern devices have. Some of these alternatives are still in development. Being able to check out the latest builds of some of these alternative OS's is certainly worth getting a new battery and MMC for my N810.

With it's FM transmitter, ample storage and indexing capabilities, somewhat open (and also confusing ) MAFW, my N900 is evolving into a personal, portable, and flexible music server of both live music streams and stored music files of all flavors.

If we see the same effort that was put into pyRadio put into clients of some of the new video services like Crackle and LiveStream, I don't see why the same could not be said about the N900 for video too. BTW, many of these video services are just now becoming available on the web, the N900 was always capable and has been waiting for quite some time now.

And just like the FM transmitter i2c-adapter, Nokia doesn't exactly provide support. The information is out there though, it is just taking some time to digest. This community will provide the support. Nokia has provided the means.

These Maemo devices never could do all of the things all people want. What they can do though is some things, perhaps even only one thing, better than anything else out there.

These devices are not where the future growth of this community lies. It lies in the culture that this community has fostered since its beginnings.

With the advent of QT, and more and more tools available for development platforms other than Linux, new members will come. They certainly will be looking for a culture to latch on to.
(BTW, free and open source development platforms are nice and all but for someone who has invested time, talent, and educational energy in another platform, FOSS can be just as big of a barrier to overcome as proprietary software is.)

If we promote our culture and provide an environment were productive development, cutting edge, humorous, popular, unpopular, and even asinine salon opinion coexist; we will grow.

If not, the lights will go out and some of us will drift off and perhaps latch on to whatever else is out there. In doing so I'm afraid we may come to the realization that although this community also didn't do everything everyone wanted... it did do some things better than anything else out there.