Well it does not look like that or I've failed to see your point. You may argue that their main revenue comes mostly from hardware devices. But, even the oldest devices contain software.

If you produce software just to support the hardware you sell and software that does not work on any other hardware, chances are you aren't a software company.
So as nokia is a hardware manufacturer, it produces as little code as it must to support their hardware. That means use already written code when licence permitts it, buy external OS when you need real support (mass-market), ditch internal OS when it's too bloby and heavy.
That accidentaly also means don't support hardware that you specifically don't produce (other manufacturers) anymore (n900).

So to get closer to my initial point, it may be "not moral" to use open source code to sell closed source software (and still, if the licence let you do so...), but I fail to see anything wrong in using open source code alongside closed source when all you want is providing a functionning platform.

Well by my definition Nokia has so far produced several devices (770, N800, N810, N900 and undisclosed one or two devices) based on the same code base, so I don't think how this applies.

This external software base is very significant in volume, the maemo is not that lightweight (e.g. they did not produce mp3 player running barebone GNU/Linux system). The fate of their propitiatory OS (symbian) is not relevant to maemo story. What is relevant is that the majority of re-used external code is released under GPL and LGPL. Where LGPL is permissive in terms of linking propitiatory software against libraries covered by it, GPL is certainly not.

Irrelevant in my opinion, they have used the GPL software and linked their software against it, so we ask them to contribute back to the community(you know you borrow something from you neighbour, than one day you return the favour) . Please not that the definition of community is not Nokia community, but a greater of GPL.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation

I'm really looking forward to seeeing the results of this official request to Nokia! When will they be available? Is there a deadline?

Yes and no. Check Nokia's commits to Linux core. Not trivial.

All you people type to much. Don't you take holidays?


I said no such thing. I said it is currently not stable enough to replace Maemo. Even the presenter, giving the keynote demo, said as much. It just not ready for a daily use phone, it's a developer platform. Until very shortly before the conference it wasn't even able to make a phone call. (Thus the applause when it did.) Sorry, but that's not screaming "working polished ready for use system" to me.

Asking people to hope that they'll finish and semi-polish a developer platform for a 2 year old device that already has a stable, highly polished system available right now seems kind of ridiculous. If this were a FreeRunner of a Neo1973, maybe that would make sense, since the base system there wasn't even functional.

Again, I'm not saying don't do it. I'm not saying It will "never be good". I'm saying that right now, it's not something a regular person can switch to, and I frankly doubt it will get there given the conditions and time frame it's taken to get to where it's at now.

Is it? Maybe. But even in MeeGo there are many "closed modules" still that have NDA code restrictions and are released as binary blobs. How is that at all different than Maemo?

In the end, I wish the MeeGo project well, but if I had to place a bet one way or the other, the odds are against them. Relying on the platform taking off enough to be anything beyond a developers toy is a pie-in-the-sky dream. Dream it if you like, but I doubt it will ever get close to what we already have.

But let's imagine for a moment you're right. It gets polished up in the next month, solidifies into a rock solid platform, and an EZ-installer is made that flashes the OS onto the N900 while retaining all your data and updating your apps to work in an emulation shell, all whilst playing a cute song. Then what? What does that gain us? Key bits are still closed. Do we get a "plethora of apps"? Form where? Nobody is developing for MeeGo right now, and the few that are are targeting non-ARM devices since the N900 is currently the only ARM based platform. Even if there are companies out there making things in the magical "QT" that crosses everything, the QT compatibility for MeeGo is still pretty poor. (Not to mention the QT "standard" has been shifting more than a trucker driving through Appalachia.)

Again I ask, what's the harm in a renewed ask? Or maybe (as others have suggested) using another channel to ask for key bits the CSSU team needs (like hal_bme_plugin or what not)?

Because MeeGo has an active lifecycle.

You consider this pole as a official request?
Nokia has already described how official request is to be made.
Many people have requested, it brought some results but not 100%.

For how long? If they release the N9(50), whatever it's called... then what? They're moving on to WP7, with no plans for future MeeGo devices as of yet. Maybe it will get an active cycle for 6 months to a year, then spiral the drain just like Maemo?

And the lifecycle for the N900 support is what? They've toggled from "never gonna happen" to "here's a developer edition" a few times. But once there's a "real" device to work on besides the N900, what then? I'm betting that cycle spirals faster than the one for the new hardware.

Again, I'd love to see it work. I'm just not really clear on why so many people are pinning their hopes on this particular donkey, given how many times we've taken it in the burro from Nokia already...

This is uncertain in future. It depends on the will of a big corporation

I have to argue about this.

You may note that FreeRunnder is not produced any more by the original producer OpenMoko. This however does not mean that the users/community were dumped.
There are 15 distributions, most of them very active, supporting both the FreeRunner and Neo1973.

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Distributions

One of them is Android, with stable 1.5 and ongoing 2.x being actively developed.

In addition there is independent hardware project Neo Freerunner GTA04 with improved hardware, which you can fit inside old shell!

Now that is the uber-geek device!