True. But the essential point is: MeeGo is actively supported for future development (by several entities actually), Maemo is not.

True, it is not easy put real pressure on them at the moment.

Based on how the winds are blowing, Nokia will soon become very hostile. At that point it would be much easier to apply the pressure.

MeeGo != Nokia

Are all n900 HW pieces open sourced? If that is the case MeeGo may be way to Go. If not it will be stuck very soon when closed sourced bits stop functioning starting from MeeGo X.Y release.

I didn't say so. I assumed that since an official request was recommended, one would be made. If so, when, and what's the deadline?

I gather that Abil will present the petition on his knees, as in days of old -- that should be formal and official enough.

What is a 90% positive result in this case? The King smiles and the petitioner isn't thrown in the moat?

No, and they won't be for many MeeGo devices, either.

By any other hardware I meant any other hardware than your own, but it's irrelevant.
Speaking about "permissive" is exactly the point. Nokia is not your neighbour, it's a company.
Either it's legal, or it's not. And if any programmer thinks its work shouldn't be used with closed source software at all, it can specify it. If he doesn't, then anyone can. Nokia included.

Plus, as Texrat mentioned, Nokia does contribute. And finally, you cannot "borrow code", open source code is non-rivalrous (and non-excludable) within what its licence permits.

I liked the part with the moat (filled with cold water maybe, or burning oil), but that assumes that petitioner is plain dumb, and you know what wise people say about assumptions...

Given what texrat has already pointed out, about Nokia (king) being a big contributor to linux kernel, it would be difficult to persuade them(copyleft owners, aka potentially pissed peasants) to act, but that may change very rapidly in future, so they may become very motivated. It happened before, even with the big ones.

There are only two ways to conquer the castle: by surprise or starvation. In either case medieval "off with their heads" sounds tempting.

Hurray, that's 555 votes. That makes, in my experience, about 5-10 people willing to put their money where their mouth is. So, what, 20 bucks a person, that's 100-200 bucks.

A good programmer has in the range of 3-5K a month, I'm going to include less-than-fortunate instances here. So, 4K, divided by 20 days (working), 200 a day?

So this community has the aggregated force to hire a programmer for half a day, most likely.

Unless you want a button moved 3 pixels to the left, this is going nowhere. If you want stuff accomplished, you need to push. Crying in a corner isn't going anywhere. It will definitely not budge Nokia.

So let's get this poll restarted. We'll have No, Yes, and Yes, and I am willing to do something about it. Code, fund, get involved in a meaningful manner (and I don't mean wiki edits). Then we count votes.

That's why we can't have anything nice. Damn the phone app. If developers would be motivated, most closed components would have been rewritten by now. We already have a lot of fixes, new Media Player (or use a better player), better camera (Fcamera or the camera-ui2), modified menus or replacements. As for Maps, even if open it would still have to use Nokia servers.

So Phone will be left behind. Maybe a few others. So what. That's not what kills a platform. Nor an excellent device.

What kills a platform is running out of juice and we're running on vapors.

So what if Maemo was suddenly open right now? We'd get a few fixes, a few updates. Still few to none games, still unpolished interface (we needs designers for that, not OSS), still nowhere near the app base of other OSs, and still we would lose ground at an astonishing pace because even with contributions we will be woefully outdated. Android has a Google V8 behind it, WP has a Microsoft V10, and we would be paddling with homemade cardboard box-sides.

It's not like we have a short to-do list and it's all hung on closed source. We have a to-do list the size of China and MAG is pretty tired.

Yes I know I'm ranting. It just makes my pressure go up seeing how I can't really use my Android replacement to anything nice until I shell out cash to someone and frankly, I'd rather give it to someone here.

For all the effort spent here, get organized. Open up a competition, start gathering pledges, and make the pot go to the winner. Use a small amount, so more people would join. Open a forum for the competition, use threads for voting, announcing winners, gather feedback.

I'll start. If this gets off the ground, I'll add 10 to each contest, next 3 contests for starters. Surely someone else here can spare a ten. We'll get the pot rolling - there has to be someone who wants to help and get a few beers out of it.

Anyone trustworthy here has a premium PayPal so donations can be centralized?

Which again makes me ask: How is this different? Once MeeGo moves to 2.0 and the API changes for drivers (which will invariably happen) will there be a huge push to update our current 1.0 drivers up to the new version? Will MeeGo be even viable before it jumps said shark? I'm not so sure it will... specifically because, as you pointed out, Nokia != Meego.

I just don't see it happening. I do hope I'm wrong, but at the current speed, I fear the new device will come out and our beloved N900 DE version will come to a screeching halt. And I'm willing to bet shortly after PR1.1 of the new device, some incompatibility will arise that will make the N900 DE not capable of upgrading, no matter how many kings horses and men we have, because of those closed bits.

Being an owner of said paper-weight (I have a GTA03v5, with buzz-fix!) I can tell you that the community was dumped, quite unceremoniously. OpenMoko re-invented the wheel 4 or 5 times, hopping from one nearly completed base to another (OM0*, SHR, FSO, etc). And the community mirrored that fracturing by making it's own versions to the point that there are 15 different flavors, none of which work. Each one has one or more majorly busted bits, and they're all so dissimilar that they can't patch all the working parts together to make one working thing.

Want a fun task? Show me one OS on a GTA03 that can connect to Wifi, hop to another wifi hot spot without rebooting, connect to a bluetooth headset, and then make a standard GSM call with audio routed through the headset. Not ONE version, not even any of the Android versions (there are 3), can do that. My N900 does it regularly several times a day without fail or the need to reboot.