for what I had and need, I ought to but I still looking up for Gtalk support but no Working-On-It.

So I would keep my money for now.

I believe I used the word donate.

Maemo began life as a commercial platform (and still is). The fact people choose to give their time for nothing is, I'm sure, appreciated by all, but it wont keep the software alive long term.

I think it is ok to donate for infrastructure at least, and that is the bare minimum.

It think that scope of your proposal should be extended to include older devices as well (e.g. application porting if not advancing features).

Bare in mind that small contributions like this will work as long there is existing hardware used be contributors. For future we need a bigger sponsor (e.g. hardware/software vendor). Without that I think it is not feasible to fund paid development, except for relatively small bounties.

Community contribution should be a primary work horse.

Merging with existing established projects (debian, gnome, etc.) would also make sense in the long run.

I voted yes. But seriously people, if you are a developer, gtf out of here and do something that is current and has some future (for the world, and yourselves). MeeGo is hoovering just above the bottom line, Maemo is below that line.

Yes, there are still some who believe that. Most of them moved to MeeGo/N9/N950. Some are spamming other threads with this (in my eyes) bxxxshxx.

No, no, look at the poll.At the time of writing, there're 112 Yes. So thats $1120. Plus abill's 2000$, already we have $3000!

This is a poll right? If you didn't think anybody would say no, then why did u put the option in the poll? Most of hem have already mentioned their reason for not donating. Gotta accept that and move on...

As Time and again it has been mentioned, the Nokia way is pretty much a dead end. It HAS been tried many times. Nokia just doesn't have any incentive to open up Maemo. And surely, the peanuts that we collect from here (even IF $50 k), will not be enough to change their minds. So I beg you, start thinking alternatives, stop being fixated...

Yes I understand the folly of this option. It JUST wont work. Neither is it feasible, nor is it the correct philosophy.

This is surely a very important thing for us, to keep the infrastructure alive. But we have time. Like timoph said, we don't need to pass around the hat just yet. We have atleast a year left.


So, now lets think alternative ideas. Take this as a brainstorming session also.

How about if we make a fund and use this money as an incentive for developers to write Open Source replacements for the Closed Source bits (like calender, phone-ui, microB, Media Player, etc)?

We could hold monthly awards of $500 or so for each Open Source replcaements...? That would encourage somebody to take their time to write good replacement apps.

As a user, I not really interested in getting all these packages replaced with OS replacements. I am just interested in a few packages in that list like calender, calender-ui, hildon-im-* (vkbd), imageviewer, addressbook, call-ui, mediaplayer, browser, etc

if you don't want to read a long post, summary is

merging with debian is strongly suggested.
donations shoud be spent on maintaining infrastructure needed by the community rather than for hiring developers.

long version :

maemo was debian base from upstream + hildon stack + nokia closed source software (media player, camera, photo viewer, maps, etc) and closed source device specific software (bme, mce, etc)

when asking about maintaining the platform, what exactly are you expecting to maintain ? all base software versions move ahead upstream, and you are stuck with older versions lacking fixes and further functionality, also making life harder to port any other program from upstream, as they will depend on the newer ones.

expecting to maintain your own distribution fully is a lot of work, having active maintenance status of each library and program in the distribution, in addition to fixing bugs and making that software stable, you will have to keep them up to date by merging patches from upstream.

are you asking for donations expecting to pay developers to maintain the distribution ? well, no amount you can collect from here will do..

this work is tedious and a lot of distributions die before delivering a stable release, and a lot of those that do deliver fail to keep up to date and die too, that's why people looking forward to maintain a distribution base their work on another well-being distribution, a really good example is ubuntu being based on debian.

on each release they pull all sources from debian sid, start working on fixing bugs, adding some customization to some packages, in addition to adding some ubuntu specific software such as the software center, ubuntu one, and recently the unity interface, to name a few.

I suggest we do the same...
first, port back all patches that went into software that is currently in a better state here than that in the debian repositories,

well you don't need to count a lot, it's just hildon-stack that is in a miserable state in the debian repositories currently, so an effort like cordia is needed, but the changes are to be merged into debian upstream.

there is just one issue, in some cases the software patches get rejected, some work has to be done to make them acceptable, rather than whine about patches being rejected..

second,
maintain a website, forum, and repositories for you distribution, guess what ? this is already here! donations are better spent to maintain these, rather than expecting to pay developers to maintain your distribution.

maemo should be rebranded to some thing else, have a clear independent release cycle, meaning every 6 months or so, debian sid is pulled and bugs are fixed, customizations added, there is no need to collect money for this as a lot of distribution survive on community based bug fixes. if this proves troublesome, it can be made a rolling distribution based on debian-testing same way as lmde is right now..

the base release should be standard enough, having nothing that is device specific, and a virtual package added in the repository for each device that is to be supported, this package should should depend on device specific support software.

If things are done this way, each device can use all packages from Debian repositories in addition to programs uploaded to the maemo repositories,.

why choose debian ?

as debian is the distribution with the highest staying power..
18 years standing as a community effort and is expected to stay in the future..

the end result would be similar to hildon-desktop on MeeGo, but instead on debian, a well maintained distribution with alot of staying power...

in for 50$

Exactly. It's not me who needs to realise this!

I voted maybe.
3 diffrent question and 1 voting posibility.
maybe for a speech2text speech_command app
even older generation phones have some-kind of.speech command app