Please stop fighting on tmo - get in a bar drink some beer and break some bottles...

For the question if this is needed. If there is no legal entity representing this community there is no sane way to pay things, receive donations, sign contracts and so on without having a legal issue at some point.
As soon as it comes to money, contracts and ownership I do not want a private person to be solely responsible or in charge. Bad things happen!

First and fore-most: I'm not here to battle you, Joerg. I'm here to tell the community simple basic facts that you appear to be lacking and misrepresenting.

I have no intention of filing a lawsuit against anyone over maemo.org or it's content. I don't speak for Nokia, MS, Adobe or anyone else though.

Migration happened in several stages. At Nemein, Maemo.org was scattered across several separate devices that shared functions with non-Maemo production servers. An initial migration was done by Nemein to condense that down into a few smaller VM servers, which were then turned over to HiFo and the techteam setup to complete that migration.

X-fade (and at least one other) was indeed in charge of that first migration, which happened long before anyone from the community, yourself included, had shell access to any of the systems in question. It happened on their internal network, before it was shipped out. It's also why the system we started up on day one had several busted parts, including karma, builder, garage, m.o login, voting, and more.

I never claimed it was. I was pointing out that if something were offered on maemo.org, even unintentionally, that contains 3rd party blobs it would put HiFo and it's directors at risk. And not just from Nokia or MS, but from the 3rd parties as well, some of whom are known for going after small targets.

One thing that does contain a flash plugin: Images for PR 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3. They ALL contain the flash plugin for microb as part of the image, along with several other 3rd party binaries covered under EULA. You know, those things you were claiming were FOSS earlier...

I'm not wearing any cap. Frankly, I don't hate you. I'm curious why you can't see reality, but there's no hate.

I also don't wear that hat of Board either. You may have missed it, but I resigned from the Board weeks ago. I posted to TMO, and mailed council, board, and even tech staff, as well as mentioning it on IRC in #maemo and #maemo-meeting. It's even in my signature, has been since the 15th.

Do you really think Nokia couldn't shut it down? Who will fight them in the courts? HiFo? You think the few grand we have in the bank will hire us a legal defender? One that's a match for Nokia's purse for a legal team?

Yes, they do. They're the network jack we're plugged into right now. Do you think Nokia wouldn't send a C&D there if the e-mail to HiFo resulted in no action? Do you think they would just shrug their shoulders, go "oh well, we tried" and walk away, letting us do as we please?

I see.. because you're a legal expert on US and Finnish law now? Do you have a law degree I'm unaware of? If so, please to speak up.

When there have been questions on what's running or about technical issues, HiFo has asked techstaff. I recall doing that on IRC and via e-mail several times in just the past couple months or so when I was still on the Board. When legal advice is needed, it's sought from legal professionals, not techstaff or the community. Do you get legal advice from the clerk at the local grocery mart? Why do you expect that of HiFo?

So you'd throw away everything, risk the whole works, to prove you're "right"? There you have it folks. Thanks for making that crystal clear, Joerg.

Do you see now why no one consults you on confidential things? You demand trust and inclusion, then threaten to break that confidence you demanded in the next post... bravo!

I think the only one that's dangerous here is you.

You, who are willing to threaten taking down servers, breaking trust, and taking legal action. You, who are willing to expose things publicly that you may have been entrusted with because of your position as techstaff. You, because you believe you are right, and everyone else on the Board, and the legal council they've talked to over these matters, is wrong. You are willing to risk everyone... but yourself.

That is, in large part, why I left the Board. I didn't feel like taking the hit for you throwing another childish tantrum, which have been increasing in frequency over the past quarter. It's one thing to have to deal with you on IRC, TMO, as Council or techstaff, where I can simply log off or ignore the forums for a few days until your rant is over. But when your tantrums can have legal and financial consequences for me? No thanks.

You think you're so perfectly right? Put yourself on the line: Join the Board, and/or get involved with the e.V. Become legally responsible for what's going on day to day on maemo.org. Then preach your legal philosophy of being able to do whatever you deem to be legal in your own mind, and to hell with what Nokia, MS, lawyers, or anyone else thinks. When you can suffer the consequences for your being wrong, then I might just take you seriously. Aber ich bezweifle, dass du die eier dafür hast.

Oi yoi yoi!!!!

Any one else deeply concerned by YET another furball between people-who-count in the maemo/hildon world?

You mean me? No. I don't count. Haven't for a couple weeks at least, so no worries there.

Don't worry. One way or another, things will be resolved within a few months. This time there's no resetting the clock.

I think I don't need to again prove every single of your claims false, woody. Everybody able to read can clearly see. And I'm bored by your weird way to twist truth to insult and attack me.
maybe you simply better shut up and finally delete your tmo account like you announced you would do instead of ruining the whole thing.
hint: you claiming I ever was so stupid to consider fiasco images a FOSS data is enough of an insult already. You implying those are available via maemo.org exhibits either your arguing method or your ignorance. I'm not asking you to prove where I ever said that fiasko were FOSS, I simply say "already shut up PLEASE!"

I'd prefer to not have to deal with this sort of unqualified unsolicited insult and attack at all, neither in a bar nor at tmo
Well, I tend to agree. Nevertheless it's a fact that maemo the community survived 14 months based on exactly this "configuration" while the preferred setup of "HiFo entity" just gave us headache all the time. I'm also fed up with being one of "the private persons" and soon I will start taking measures to discontinue this situation, but I think it's legitimate to ask if we really need HiFo entity and particularly what are the "new" purposes of such entity, considering that any contract with Nokia is unlikely to ever happen and even when it happens it's more than questionable if it's beneficial to the community. Obviously nobody been willing to answer yet what exactly are the benefits community can expect from such contract, all I heard so far is FUD about made-up intelectual property of Nokia in any binary or sourcecode hosted on http://maemo.org. Sorry I still fail to see any such IP. I'm rather sure it's already available somewhere, but if needed techstaff can once more provide a `sudo ls -lR /` of all VMs in maemo infra and then we can spot any such binaries and if they are considered any violation of usage terms & licence they came with. I'm pretty sure nothing on maemo.org is '(C)Nokia' or otherwise commercial and causes a threat to maemo.org by getting published/shared or by being used despite a needed license for such usage missing. IOW: I fail to see what is it that Nokia can trade in to us in such contract for any obligations HiFo would accept in such contract - except the domain name. And the binaries at *.nokia.com that are desperately needed by users but not on maemo.org and also off the table aiui, some of them for well understood reasons (as already elaborated on, re Nokia != Adobe etc). So is it really an offense to ask if such contract is a good deal? Is it an offense to ask if we need HiFo at all and for what (suggesting that somebody comes up with a detailled answer what's further purpose of HiFo rather than attacking me for asking the question)? Woody's outbursts clearly shown in my book that HiFo might use incorrect data when evaluating if the contract is a good deal or not. I'm concerned about that.

[edit] I seriously would prefer Nokia to tell us which of the binaries are 3rd source and thus a threat to Nokia or us when we would offer them anywhere, and then Nokia would make up their mind and allow us to provide the rest which is Nokia's very own property. If HiFo's negotiations are targeted at that, I'm all happy and hope you will succeed, and community in the end will benefit at least from sustained support for the basic blobs actually owned by Nokia. Heck, I guess we (the community) even could come up with fiasco images cleaned out so no more 3rd party IP is in them. We did much worse missions-impossible before. Then we could actually start to provide working flashing for users who need to reflash their N900 (flasher already RE'ed) - something that Nokia already stopped *) to do.

*) Well, almost: http://nds2.fds-fire.nokia.com/fdp/i...ED_MR0_ARM.bin I idly wonder if the security issue that Nokia claimed had made them take down tablets-dev is fixed in this fiasco (PR1.3.1). If so, then they could've done themselves and users a favour by getting more specific about the nature of that security issue.

Was your age @ joerg and woody ??? Please. It feels like 2 educated qualified persons running naked ..

So just asking after comprensive reading , what exactly HIFO will do and how benifical ? What exactly are the "contracts" ? Will it be ever possible to run maemo on other devices i mean if neo900 takes momentum and in future if other projects or devices want to use maemo legaly like any other os or distro can it be used ? How exactly will neo900 will use n900 images if there are licsenced bits of nokia or affilated third parties as previously said ? Is hifo , council ,community only aimed at running the infra for nxx devices , is there any future then ?