i don't have a Harmattan device, thus yes, Fremantle is my primary interest, obviously.
still i think the community (Maemo.org) will have a much harder time surviving if we don't do away with this fragmentation

thus, for Harmattan, (some of) the persons who developed closed bits are still around and available (to work on those closed bits)?
NOKIA still seems to actively develop OS2011.
working on a OS2012/3, maybe?

No Dan. I want you to not troll THIS thread. If you insist on continuing the pedantic Nokia bashing, find a more appropriate outlet. This isn't it.

EDIT: on the other hand, if you want to constructively criticize Nokia decisions that are germane to the topic, I'll not only get off your back, I may even agree with and support you. My issue as a moderator is more with the abject hostility than the intent.

Anyway, don't expect further posts like that to stand in this thread. I'm pretty lax on topic-veering and even silliness but there's a point called "enough".

Back to the topic...

I'm not aware of anybody at Nokia working on this. I'm not the best person to assess the complexity of this task.

Presumably http://wiki.qt-project.org/Qt_5_on_Nokia_N9 would be useful to make an estimation and recycle some work?

The abject hostility might be proportional to the abject futility over the years, but your point is understandable. How this benefits either Nokia nor consumers that purchase their hardware is beyond me. After getting burned and watching how it's gone, I'm not compelled to purchase again and I just keep waiting because it WAS hopeful and MeeGo just melted away similarly, if not quicker.

The questions I asked still remain unanswered and unsatisfied except for some distracting 'hey, guy! look over there!' sort of responses. Nothing that sounds like collaboration or forward momentum so far. Anybody from any side care to give a proper answer about open-sourcing crucial, still-closed portions that prevent new kernels and enable a fully functional operating system (at LEAST on older hardware Nokia doesn't support anymore, for crying out loud)?

While not Maemo/Fremantle, we're bringing it to the N900 through Nemo/Mer (see http://review.merproject.org/494). I don't see any big technical reason why you couldn't run Qt5 on maemo though - albeit the libxcb may be old.

The approach taken with the Harmattan program at Nokia was rather simple, since it happened along the MeeGo project. All the pieces that Nokia wanted to share were contributed in the context of MeeGo or Qt, most of them while they were being developed. For all the rest Nokia had a strong business reason to keep it Nokia proprietary (and then there were the usual binaries from third parties).

A lot of Harmattan proprietary UI code happens to be written as / for MeeGo Touch Framework, which is currently unmaintained since all the development went for Qt Quick.

Whatever is closed between Qt and Kernel is probably either a delicate piece or a component unique of Harmattan, not developed further and with an OSS alternative at MeeGo upstream.

What do you want opened and why? Maybe there is an alternative solution. The Mer project and people here like timoph or Stskeeps know that path very well.

I thought the answer was clear. Nokia doesn't have plans to open any Fremantle or Harmattan code at this point, neither previous OS200* versions.

Yep. Here's your proof. Just added a Lumia 900 to the list.

But there's more than 3 of us on this project, two are remote. I ask for not only myself but others that are curious about sourcing MeeGo and Symbnian devices.

Since the 808 will invariably not be released in the US, that's also a question/concern.

Dang it, I should have quoted you. You removed your post it seems.

Getting the basics running on Fremantle would most likely not be that hard, since there is still support for C++98 compilers newer than GCC 4 (I don't know if we require any specific version, I think anything 4.0 or newer will do). A more difficult problem might be whether codebases like V8 will work, but probably not an insurmountable problem.

That wouldn't give you platform theming of QWidgets though, because that was rather heavily hacked into Maemo's Qt. It might be possible to resurrect most of it as a style plugin, or perform the same hacks again, though.

[EDIT]: ah, it would also require a relatively new libxcb (and dependencies) built for fremantle - I don't think they exist already, though I don't know for sure.

With regards to the N9 port - it won't give you all that much useful. Fremantle's display stack won't have the hacked up XI2 support that the Harmattan port uses - but fremantle doesn't have multitouch anyway, so that's no major loss.

[EDIT 2]: I definitely don't have the time (or desire) to work on this myself, but I'm happy to act as a point of contact / mentoring from a Qt perspective for anyone wanting to try take this on.

How about at LEAST just enough to have newer kernels and supporting software, so that the software we run on our devices can continue to be maintained properly, patched with security updates and able to evolve along with the Linux kernel. Meanwhile, even the most ancient of Android devices (i.e. my old Droid, which doesn't seem to want to stop getting updates from CyanogenMod--just got yet another last month) are getting the latest Linux kernels thanks to the AOSP. I don't understand the 'strong business reasons' for preventing newer kernels and tools from compiling to existing hardware. While even my old 486DX4/100MHz sitting in the corner can still boot a MODERN Linux kernel I can compile, my supposedly far more capable Nokia N800 cannot. This is hardly the "Linux" experience I expected when I picked up the device with so much promise.

My interpretation from your answer is pretty much 'too bad' (is that right?). Well, that would be consistent with the rest of my experiences with Nokia (support especially) and this was the last dangly string of hope for SOMETHING to redeem the investment and damaged reputation of Nokia and salvage some kind of brand loyalty. Mind you, you're hardly to blame--you're just the messenger but it's disappointing.

I'm done with this line of questioning. It might have, at this point in time, satisfied my questions about how the council will be able to communicate and represent community needs to Nokia and how receptive Nokia will be to community concerns and interests. heh It's good to have some clear communications about long-standing community concerns before elections are up. Thank you.