Who is getting OTA?

there is no way in limiting who can receive an OTA.

Aniello

I think being given a device to test in the first place showed they matter.

Yes there is. The feature can be turned off in firmware.

But then we won't be able to get it when they'll release it.
Unless it'll be a whole FIASCO to download...

It could be.. but I doubt so.

As you can deduce from the versioning, there is several builds every week. In practice one or more updates a day. In every update there are a number of fixes integrated through package updates. If you have been in this distro integration work you know that the quality among releases might vary from one release to another just in one iteration.

From time to time we prepare one release with a specific purpose out of the R&D team, be a release for wider internal testing within the people at Nokia that has a device, be a Summit, etc.

These special releases require special attention, and now all our special attention is concentrated on the sales release. The team focusing in this release is after a small collection of remaining issues. Most of the development is concentrating already on the first maintenance release.

The feedback from Summit users has been useful confirming our own testing of the sales candidate and is being useful as well to prioritize bugs to be addressed in the maintenance release.
This is software development as usual.

Now, opening the can of public daily releases would bring probably a lot more noise than signal. Don't think only on the good samaritans reporting issues. Think also about a crowd of potential end users with pre-orders or thinking on an early purchase - without any background or experience in (open source) software development. Think also in a very thirsty blogosphere and IT media looking for Maemo/N900 related news and happy to highlight any details about problems, bugs, etc, days before an expected sales start.

This is not what an R&D team needs right before completing a final release. We experimented already a lot loaning these 300 pre-production devices with beta software to people free to do and explain whatever they want in public.

You can criticize the decisions but you can't deny that what we are doing with this release hasn't been done before by Nokia or any company in its league.

I have several large mailinglists where I would have that amount of mails at the end of the year. Even my normal INBOX has accumulated ~2000 messages in the last 2 months (so that also is > 10000 messages in a year).

I believe a language thing slipped in the machinery - I understood 'other people' in Mikkovs post as in folks who have access to internal, publicly not available builds. They are not part of the 300 loaner program, don't count as general public and in that sense they don't matter (except as a good source for speculations and guessing ).

I mean only on certain interim builds is OTA turned off, temporarily. If/when that happens we just update the old-fashioned way.

Yeah but do you really need to keep all these mailing list messages?

Depends on the mailing list. Sometimes it can be useful, especially on more development oriented lists, where you may occasionally need to refer to past proposals, etc.