I know, but only because I took some time to find out. Joe Schmoe looking at them would think they were a joke because of the lack of content and usability.

While I'm glad they are making this a top priority, the initial bug report is over two years old. TWO YEARS. That in itself shows the ineffectiveness of a bugtracking system when it takes two years to have someone finally go "Yeah, we really should do this, I'll get right on it."

I'm from Missouri, and our state motto is "Show Me," as in, "I'll believe when I see it." We are skeptics.

I really don't have the energy to respond to all of this, but, suffice to say, you should probably consider involving yourself a bit in the process before you make sweeping judgements about who and what.

Just because I have only recently started talking doesn't mean I don't know anything about the project or Nokia. I find it amazing that Nokia themselves independently develop at least three flavors of Linux/BSD.

Maemo, OpenBSD IPSO, and Linux-based IPSO. I believe there's a redhat based variant in there somewhere, but I'm not sure.

I just happen to see problems that are stifling a lot of progress and allowing competitors chip away at their user-base because of it.

I've always been unhappy about their approach to making software accessible. It has the potential to to cause a big headache for customers and I know it first hand when you are on call and some big customer is panicking and screaming and swearing at you on 3 am on a Sunday morning because of a software issue and you can't easily get it from Nokia because their support site and software updates require registration, sponsorship, and human approval before you can maybe get the fix.

For maemo, this isn't something that would likely happen, but when Paypal's $500,000 pair of IP2450's protecting their infrastructure are flapping because of a memory leak that reached critical mass and is threatening to take them offline, I have issues with it.

I'm not talking about anything besides Maemo and its community, and you can't expect to just jump in and know everything about the history behind today's problems.

You've mixed a lot of different issues in your rant here, and placed blame on people that don't deserve it.

If you really want to "stir the pot", send an e-mail to Nokia. Most of the people here can't do anything and don't really feel like reading rants.

Oh, and about the open development, you do realize that all the development on Nokia's non-proprietary stuff is done either upstream on in the SCMs on Garage, right?

You mean those project pages in the garage that say Access Denied when I try to view them? That is the opposite of open. Which is closed.

Those are not open projects. Those are Nokia proprietary stuff. If it's open source, it's open, if it's proprietary, it's not. What's hard to understand about that+

Having owned a 770 and owning a n810, submitted/commented/voted on several bug reports, and developed/ported applications I think I'm a little more seasoned about these issues. Honestly I could care less who is to blame, it really just sucks.

My big problem is that Nokia can't get out of it's own way, let alone drive a sensible development process. Independent development for the platform is a joke with the only good tool being scratchbox ( which can't install on 64bit systems )*, documentation that is spotty at best ( check out the bora docs sometime )**, the bug database does suck***, and a community that is so starved for new ideas that many developers are turned off from the deluge of comments/criticism. Figuring out how to use some of the necessary system libraries is an exercise in frustration. And last, but not least, is a rather convoluted and poorly documented process for uploading and inclusion in the default "Extras" repository. ( yes I know this is getting better, but better than sucks doesn't say a lot ).

I have already been flamed for calling the entire platform "BETA" with calls to "Wait for Diablo"..... well it's here and I don't think Nokia has made any great strides with it's QA process.

My honest opinion is the whole platform really kinda sucks. Why do I stick with it? Because right now it sucks *LESS* than anything else that is out there right now and I don't think I'm the only one who thinks this way. This makes the whole platform an easy target as people will flee like rats from a sinking ship once a better technology comes around. We have already seen the iSheep and eeePC stealing users left and right, just wait till Android really hits the streets with a sane development system and good hardware.

The NIT's *COULD* have been great. I would never recommend them to anyone, but those people that have seen me use one think the idea is great and are flabbergasted to find out that they have been making them for years without promoting them.

* Scratchbox2 development is coming along, but at what pace?; Yes I know about the VM, but last I checked it's chinook SDK, not DIABLO.

** Yes, trying to be a good developer and make my stuff work under OS2007

*** Bugs with more than 15 votes sorted by bug number ( date ) I think it's crazy that bugs listed as major defects have wallowed for two years. Enhancements like being able to customize the clock to 12/24 hours have languished for well over 2 years, and proper ogg support has been there for almost 3 years.

That's a lot of propreitary software, and most of the projects with the highest activity are closed off. How can it be open source if you can't even participate in the development of the software?

And what exactly is so propreitary? I'd like to know.

You do realize that Extras is pretty much completely community-side now, right? You are 100% enabled to help out here, rather than just complaining, why not dive in and help? There's maybe a half-dozen people actively putting insane amounts of their free time into it, and nobody else. Heck, after the autobuilder was first released there was exactly one person testing it.

Rather than simply dismissing these efforts out of hand, get behind them and help out. Everybody involved is stretched thin and they need all the help they can get.

Niels, Ed and Mikhail have been putting an insane amount of time getting the autobuilder into shape and providing community support for it (mostly on IRC and in -developers). There's a lot of places you can lay blame, but on these three guy's heads is not one of them.

Jaffa has been putting a lot of time into developing good documentation for the process, which you can find (and help out with) here, and the MUD builder for helping with packaging.

Dismissing these people's (and other's) hard work is really inexcusable.