I didn't say it was right. I said it was much less of a big deal. Just as some people don't regard software/vid/music pioracy a big deal. Or taking paperclips from work.

In the wider culture, the idea that "I didn't break any rules.... I just exploited a loophole" works perfectly well for offshore accounts, tax dodges and MPs expenses. It might not be how we want the world to work (which is why we're here) but other people's values are different.

The thing is that in the world of communications, computers and the Internet, exploiting loopholes is a very serious thing. If he had found a way to bypass the proper procedures to force his product into the Ovi store and willfully did it , he would likely be facing legal proceedings right now.

What he did is not acceptable in a commercial/capitalist environment either. The only difference is that different techniques can be utilised.

As a software author expecting people to run his code on their devices, you would hope that he would have a fairly good grasp on what is acceptable, whether explicitly stated or not. I don't think that the Maemo rules say that his code should not secretly send dozens of premium rate SMS messages either (I'm not claiming his code does that - just an example of what is, to me, obviously unacceptable behaviour)

I understand what you're saying, and it's clear from this thread alone that not everyone agrees that this was a big deal, but I disagree that that's a FOSS vs proprietary thing.

Take, for example, Apple's iPhone App Store; it's highly proprietary, and famously has an approval/QA process that many developers find inconvenient. If someone found a technical trick that allowed them to get their app into the trusted store interface on end-users' devices without going through the approval process, do we really think that Apple's response would be to accept that as something that happens in a dog-eat-dog capitalist world, or would they condemn it, drop the app and ban the developer?

If you wanna continue discussing the Q&A process, feel free to open a new thread. But by all means close this thread as it still is a SIO2-bash-thread. From a more mature point of view I'd even suggest to delete it.

- The files have been removed from the maemo repo - period as it seems.
- SIO2 has been publically tared and feathered for his behaviour.

Isn't that what some of you yearned for in the first coupla postings on this thread? C'mon, what else do you want?

If you'd ask me, the case is now out of maemo.org's bounds. If you no longer host any of SIO2's files leave him the hell alone! And cut disgracing him publically. He DID apologize and even explained the motivation for his behaviour! If some of you won't let that count - hey, make it up with your ownself.

[completely subjective mood mode]
Pardon my French: Congratulations for beating the first real 3rd party game provider out the house with a toilet brush.
[/completely subjective mood mode]

nuff said...

Seeing the thread this is going, I'm afraid you're right -- to a point. I'm going to pay close attention to this thread and lock it should people keep bashing SIO2 Interactive (quite a mouthful for a username).

A few things:

- From a moderator perspective, the whole thread will not be deleted, it would not be a mature thing to do. SIO2 has shown an issue with our process, and we need to keep a record of this problem.

- From a community perspective: Looking at how easy it was to do this, I'm surprised it didn't happen earlier. Actually, I think the next problem we'll face is having editors asking for votes in exchange of freebies -- that'll be quite different to handle. I think it's a shame that we couldn't both (SIO2 and the Community) shuffle our feet and apologise for having allowed this to happen -- just look at SIO2's threads to see how happy he's made some people; has all of that gone just because he plugged holes we should never have allowed to exist in the first place? We need to use these opportunities to further ourselves rather than spend so much time bashing a single individual. Over two hundred posts in this thread alone!

So I'll repeat myself, in case I wasn't very clear the first time:

Use this thread to discuss how this issue occurred, how we should handle it in the future (because we will have to go there again), summarise what we can learn from it. Use it for bashing again and it will be locked.

I'm STILL astonished about the "we-are-FOSS-and-so-much-better-than-the-rest-of-this-greedy-world" behaviour shown here. This thread reminds me of a communist mob. Stop dreaming and being naive. Very few of the available FOSS software came into existence for "free".

Most of the time, either a corporation (or some poor Venture Capitalist behind it ) or an academic/research/military institution (with some poor citizens behind) financed the major contributions that really brought a project forward. They paid developers to do that work.

Very few major contributions come from people who work on it in their spare time for real "free" - simply because most people need to buy food and shelter and take care of a family. And as being a developer pays well in the real world, because it is a demanding profession that needs a high level of personal abilities, producing software for free sounds not really attractive

Just look at all my widgets and things stuck somewhere in between -devel, -test and the real extras. With comments abused as a forum with no moderation. With no established help/doc system. With Bugtracking abused as personal helpdesk. But I only have an hour or two per day for Maemo. If I have to spend this time battling the FOSS bureaucrats, my motivation quickly goes downhill.

Masses, have mercy upon your developers. For our sake, couldn't we just end this thread with something like "OMG shiz happenz LOL" and move on?

(And yes, recaller will get auto-recording, I have gotten com.nokia.csd.call under control yesterday evening :-)

And where is Quim Gil in all this? We might really need a moderating hand from Nokia taking up some responsibility here, too.
- Tame the mob
- Offer us a perspective in the Ovi Store
- Encourage the Maemo.org people to clean up the process
- Help find a productive solution

I can't believe this thread is still going!

Everything that has to be said has been said!

Let's agree to disagree and start thinking about something constructive.

I think locking this thread is probably a good idea.

voice of reason

I agree that this thread be locked from further irrelevant/unnecessary comments.

I get your point, and yes, dishonest behaviour might have scored some points in ancient Sparta (note: only if you got away with it!) but this case really isn't a culture clash. I'm fairly sure SIO2 would be just as outraged as the rest of us if he had followed the rules and then one of his competitors came along and broke them.

That was borderline fraud (the phrase "obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception" comes to mind), not capitalism. Calling it that is insulting to most well-behaved for-profit companies that wouldn't even consider that kind of tactic.

Sadly, true. I guess we all lost some innocence yesterday :-(

I think there was value in drawing a line very publically in the first case, if only pour encourager les autres.

A lot of people have invested a lot of time and effort to get maemo.org extras where it is now and convince Nokia to include and enable it by default in the application manager. This kind of thing could undermine all that work and the credibility of extras.

I'm very happy this instance was caught and dealt with early (thanks Venomrush, ossipena, X-Fade!), but next time we might get someone, shall we say, more capable in tricking the system so a clear and public demonstration that this will not be tolerated is useful.

No, this is absolutely NOT Nokia's responsibility. Nokia's involvement goes as far as deciding whether extras is good enough to include and enable in the sales package. It's the community's repository and it falls down to us to deal with it.

At the core this is a social problem and trying to solve it with technological means will only results in an arms race. If some holes exist that can be closed without causing problems for legitimate uses by all means let's close them, but they system will always be abuseable.

At the social level the things we can do/improve are:

• Communicate the rules clearly and unambiguously. Even if that means stating the obvious, like "votes from the same person/entity are not allowed".
• Formulate and communicate the consequences of violating the rules.
• Be vigilant and try to detect abuse early (again, kudos to the testing squad for catching this).