free?
it was only free (for you) because NOKIA pays the bills.
the moments that stops (whenever that will be...), Maemo.org will stop as well...

i have to agree w/ fw190;
even though i only followed loosely the thread, most ppl will use their N900 'itl it wears out & then switch to android devices, mostly.
most likely, by the end of 2012, very few N900s will be in active use.

made a download of all repositories and going to set up a local repository structure to refresh the N900 with Fremantle, if needed.
and keeping an eye on MeeGo, just in case it gets to a working release.

considering there is no hardware platform for Fremantle or Diablo to continue development on, i wonder what the fuss is all about

I ask for more civility, and then have to come in here and delete a slew of troll/response posts.

Times like these make me wonder why I even bother.

Back on topic... please?

Very true but I don't think charging money from maemo applications will work for a couple of reasons:

1 - It's up to the individual developer to decide the pricing and what to do with the income (if any), not the larger community. That is if the developer even chooses to put the application into a store in the first place.

2- A million monthly free downloads do not transfer to monthly million paid downloads. Especially when the applications are already available for free in extras (enabled by default) so we would need to close down extras and that would be IMO a move to kill the community.

So IMO turning maemo.org into a application store funded place is not the way to go. Besides why would developers who do applications for the community be the ones paying the bills instead of the users enjoying their work for free. Again IMO if we end up being a community funded place then the whole community needs to chip in. Collecting voluntary donations from the community i.e. every 6 months would be one way to do it. And if/when there is not enough donations to run the place one would know that it's time to close the shop. This way the community ifself would decide if it's needed or not.

Luckily we do not need to make such decisions now and have good time to come up with a plan. (I know some people have different opinions on the decision making time.)

You ask - you've it

I can't agree - to even know if we should consider financing ourselves - so, if we should create legal entity - we must know how high cost will be, or at least be able to project expenses. I think we can't particularly plan further in meritocratic way, without such a data. When we don't have "hard data" to process on, we're flooded by sea of flame(war).

I see what you are saying. These things always have some sort of chicken and egg problem and a leap of faith somewhere along the line. If you read the log of the last council meeting, it seems like something is possible for maemo.org. How much and what we cut from the infrastructure is the hard question. I'll see what I can do (I'm just one person and don't want to impose too much on our IT vendor.)

Where I live (United States), the expenses of a legal entity can be relatively minimal and easily sustained by a few volunteers. It does take a bit of time to get started though, especially to get tax-free status for donations. I don't know about other jurisdictions.

The real issue is what does the entity commit to doing, and what type of annual or semi-annual budget is necessary to accomplish that. One option is a very loose sort of mission statement and minimalist commitment - "the promotion of ______" which can be satisfied with little more than a website. At the other end is a strong commitment - such as "provide and maintain a linux distribution called ______" which would require a sizeable budget. I hope people don't think we are talking about the latter in these discussions.

1+ year (from Nokia's termination of the relationship and financial support) seems like eons away in mobile-tech development world..

...how much would change between now and then?

I have read most of the pros and cons here. From what I can see an extension of any sort needs a time line and a management plan. It's very naive to think that a platform can live on forever.
Is it not better to remember ITT/maemo.org when it was going strong instead of letting it slowley fester into something hardly recognisable in the future?
Maybe there is a half way ground somewhere but I do think that without this site the N9 will falter into obscrurity even faster than it would without Nokias "input".

Question: do we have to maintain our 'maemo' personality until the end of 2012 before we can change anything?

Maybe it would make sense to make 'us' broader to capture the N9 momentum somehow. Of course this would lead to a lot of "TOO SOON!" thoughts.

Just a question... and an idea.

Let me remind of the mission statement I proposed a couple weeks ago -

to support maemo-based or maemo-derived open source software for cellphones and tablets

(This was meant to include vanilla Meego and Meego Harmattan, and to exclude Android. Now it could be modified to include WebOS and that would be fine with me. Feel free to crowdsource)

So that mission statement has a bit of maemo personality, yet broader so that it could be relevant for years to come. Assuming you agree with this mission statement, is it too soon? Probably not. If you think there is a need for community governance, will that need go away soon? Probably not.

I second including support for webOS based things - if we can work together with webOS developers, that would be great. And I don't mean only "sucking" them to our case.

Also, I'm waiting (with faith ;P ) for as much traffic data about servers, as You'll be able to collect.