That's great.

Now back on topic...

The topic is "what do we do next?" with the obvious additional context of "as a maemo community". Unless qole says otherwise it's not for escapees to announce what foreign tunnels they're digging.

Thanks for your understanding.

In any case the only move worth making is something that is hardware agnostic at this point. Since the hardware is aging, no sense in trying to develop things further that tie you down still to the N900.

So then as Qole said, the most sensible move is to MeeGo forums, and developer community. Matter of fact, some from this community have already made that migration from TMO to MeeGo. In time hardware companies will pop up to take on the MeeGo mantle, and for all it's differences with Maemo it still is the Linux based mobile OS to choose that fits the needs of most in this community. Piling over to MeeGo means we can play a vital role in developing awareness, a sense of community, and recreating the openness we highly regarded with our N900's on new Hardware as different companies take up MeeGo. It will be the best primed position to fall back to so as to reinforce the ideals we want to cherish. Matter of fact, developers should get into MeeGo coding and read up on the Intel literature if they haven't yet. I still wonder if they are still offering that free Developer access to making an account and obtaining resources to there AppUp store.

The Cordia project should also proceed in being less dependent on a N900 hardware ... it probably will become the UI for some XYZ hardware running MeeGo in the future. We can actually create a portrait mode that should of been with our own concepts ... if we can adapt Cordia to not only landscape phones but to also include slate only phones and improve on that experience, it would be awesome in its own regard. The failing with CSSU, and CE is that it really is tied down to hardware, and matter of fact it is discontinued hardware. Obviously the endeavors taken for those projects brought with them unique insights that can be adapted to different hardware, but those are organizational in nature ... the code is still attached to the hardware.

In summary, now is exactly the time to not be attached to a hardware, but rather see to it the broader idea of a fully powered Linux based mobile OS isn't forgotten like Access Linux, and Else. We need to go to MeeGo and strengthen it, so that would be OEM's say "Hey there is a market demand and a community for this OS that already has apps and developers but no phones!"

No need to go and start another forum because we only have the OS left, and the hardware is gone. If this happens it just dilutes the mind share available to MeeGo. Here is a solid community wasting it's time on a relic of a hardware rather than making sure now the only fallback left isn't given a focused effort is what it will look like. So for me, my move is to MeeGo forums slowly but gradually and I urge others to follow suit.

I'm afraid I can't agree with you because, as we are speaking about mobile devices and not pc's, hardware agnostic just does not cut it for the following reasons:

• This community exists because the members of it love their devices use them every day and develop on them for their own amusement and use and to be useful to others. People won't go develop apps on a vm for an imaginary MeeGo device which they don't even own, to be able to look at (and use) the fruits of their efforts.
  
• Installing oses on a phone is not trivial and requires many man-hours of work. See NitDroid for example. Hardware agnostic approach means that every dev will try to port the os on the device of his preference and in the end we will have a dosen alpha stage unusable ports which brings me back to point 1
  
• No new developers will come whatsoever. New people here come by buying their new device. Very very few do it the way around.
  
• We have no product. We can't build a website and say "Download Now", it will be a series of wiki pages explaining the ways one can try our software on a vm or some lucky devices. If Intel is unable to push the product in the manufacturers I fear that our contribution will not be very helpful to attract them. As a matter of fact most of the work done on maemo.org projects is interface-related and manufacturers prefer to differentiate using their own proprietary ui's. Especially cordia looks just like maemo (which is directly connected to nokia and maybe to the eyes of some to a failed product, and there may be even patents protecting the design) so no other phone company will be willing to use it. I don't mean to say that it is an obsolete ui, I think it's the best mobile ui in the wild, but marketing wise is probably a no-go for other manufacturers.
  

We can find suitable hardware replacements..

Cooperate with any of following projects:

• Gnome
• Kde

Become part of existing distributions:

• Debian
• Canonical?
• Meego

Create our own distribution.

Meego is here and mostly working. The trouble is it is a little bit closed company, since you don't get to vote there. Being community sponsored by Nokia made sense, since Nokia is one of the leading companies within meego. Now with Nokia pulled back, the role of this community will diminish. Meego is a highly corporate environment. Yes, it is true, the common developers/communities can contribute, but making/influencing decision is another thing.

Cooperation with gnome and kde might be better in long term, but at the moment it can not provide working distribution in short term.


EDIT: I've just remember we've neglected one tiny, smallish problem: FUNDING

For good measure, CE is properly layered, so there's a hardware adaptation (actually two at the moment, N900 and N950), you can put in other device hardware adaptations, also non-Nokia devices. On top of that sits MeeGo Core and on top of that, the Handset UX based UI.

Aha... So qole finally ran out of Absinthe, and deprivation led him to post here again, creating one of the most interesting threads on TMO as of late.

So all in all, good news on a good day :-)

Now I must go read up on that Cordia business, which I admit had totally escaped me up to now !

Sursum corda, old boy ! Wir sind alle Berliner...

Edit: just signed up for the CordiaTab preorder.
I've funded enough Nokia hardware, might as well try this.
You never know, it might even work :-)

fpp: I've still got lots of Absinthe, and tekki: I don't know if you should waste so much time replying to some people.

I definitely agree with your points, I'm talking about where the community moves to. Hardware agnostic is the place, but the topics within the MeeGo community is what we definitely will drag with us. Actually developers have for the most part already began leaving this community for the MeeGo one, we might as well follow suit.

What the discussion is about is greater than what Hardware as a community we should get behind ... it is where could this community migrate when the inevitable day comes when TMO ceases to operate or serve it's purpose. We need a house to get behind to even begin talking shop or about the N900 we dearly love. Going to a community that is solely based around a hardware has obsolescence tied into it. We can start a N900 message board else where ... but if some other hardware pops up, we get forked as a community and this will happen many times over. MeeGo forums is actually built for this purpose, although I agree right now it is a very disorganized message board that needs cleaning and organizing into different sub-forums which some could be hardware specific. Sort of like xda-developers forum ... each phone gets it's own area.

Again the reason why MeeGo forums is a good alternative is that we can talk MeeGo OS and just not hardware. The OS comes first going forward, as far as hardware goes right now N900 is available and the N9 and N950 probably will require drivers/ firmware to be sourced from Nokia. It makes more sense as being a large community to use our population to make good community based input towards the direction of the MeeGo OS. We can directly have an impact within the Linux Foundation and make our voices better heard. Definitely it is worth migrating some of the Wiki info based on the N900 over to MeeGo, like flashing the device. It just makes sense, join rather than start something new.

Ok I can't object to that but maybe the character of that community is so different that we do not fit in. After the linux foundation refused to host user applications, how tolerable would it be in us posting arbitrary things on the forum that may not directly violate the rules but... (preenv comes in mind) or just chitchatting as we have very much done in all subforums here a lot lately.
On the other hand MeeGo software wise is the successor of maemo, and maybe the only place to go to, other than make our own.