Actually, Ari's day-to-day use is probably the main reason why the next version is a phone.

Tim

Jaffa - good luck with that, I've been banging my personal drum for over 3 years now and I've seen little real progress, just lots of promises to improve which never really materialise. I can count the number of Nokia/Maemo developers actively involved in Bugzilla on one hand...

Contrast the Maemo situation with Moblin, as Intel put Nokia to shame with the amount of involvement from Intel engineers in the Moblin bugzilla.

Perhaps the question for Ari should be why Intel are able to achieve a much greater level of transparency than Nokia when discussing defects and enhancements?

It still sucks, yes, but there have been lots of improvements over the last year or so. It's slow in coming, but I suspect things will get a lot better once Fremantle gets a real announcement, etc. Though, of course, that'll all be much too late for the community to attempt save Nokia from themselves. . . .

Because Intel sells to OEMs, not consumers.

What difference does it make? Moblin and Maemo are both operating systems (with associated applications) that will find their way into the hands of the consumer, either directly or via an OEM.

Intel appear willing to publicly file, and more importantly discuss, the bugs in their product whereas Nokia prefer to keep their dirty laundry a secret and are doing a very good job of ignoring those bugs raised by the community (there is little if any direct input from Nokia developers against publicly filed bugs, many of which are closed as WONTFIX when the respective OS version is end-of-lined).

I can fully understand that some bugs need to be kept secret (ie. security related bugs, or bugs against as yet unanounced products/features, all of which can be handled by existing Bugzilla configuration) but the demand for more involvement is there and has been there for for 3+ years, the management pay lip services and say they want it to happen... but nothing ever does.

If you wanted to work on an open source OS, and had to choose between Moblin and Maemo - which bunch of developers would you rather work with, or alternatively be ignored by?

Here's a question, and I don't know how to better phrase it so please feel free to edit but keep the core idea:

Nokia seems to be going in two directions. However, these two directions do seem as if they will meet at a head. There's the transition from a device to a services company with Ovi; and then there's the change of a closed development mindset with S40 and Symbian S60 to the open source/open community nature of the new Symbian and Maemo. Its almost as if Nokia is setting itself up to be a RedHat of mobile open source. And that isn't a bad thing if the services piece can come together and be totally seamless inside and outside of Ovi. So here's my question: is "mobile" really the best playground for a company which is basing its value on the services it provides and the relationships that it has maintained? Or, in Nokia's way of looking beyond what we see now, does the pointing to Maemo, open source, and this services-orientation point to a key element of technology-as-culture that we miss because we don't have the same view that a company such as Nokia has? If the latter, can you elaborate on what Nokia sees, and why this viewpoint is significant for a community like Maemo to understand.

Sorry for the length, the question is deep and has a lot of backing needed. Thanks for proposing to ask the questions from us and present those.

The main difference is that Intel sell chips, not devices - ie in a moblin vs maemo comparison they are are more analogous to ARM and TI than Nokia. Moblin is important to them because every vendor who stuck Linux on a netbook or MID in the last 2-3 years made a complete hash of it, but they don't care about things like UI "differentiation" and such.

A couple of more related questions:

Arguably one of the biggest causes of community frustration is the status of Diablo updates, or lack thereof. With that in mind,

a) Can you comment on the supported period for Fremantle, either in absolute (eg "X months after lead device goes on sale") or relative ("until Y months after Harmattan is released") terms? Setting realistic expectations seems like a good thing for both sides.

b) Mer may be the future for current devices, but unfortunately it's not quite ready for day to day use yet. Is Nokia open to the possibility of handing Diablo maintenance over to the community, assuming that that would cover only open source packages and community updates would be clearly marked as such, unsupported by Nokia and installed at the owner's risk? There are several community-contributed patches for existing bugs in Maemo bugzilla and other places, but with the official status of Diablo SSUs in limbo no one dares set up a repository and publish fixed binaries as that could break a possible future SSU.

Will you believe the answer? I won't.

i won't, either. but there is a point in asking this question: bug them with this issue. make them understand this is not something we will easily forget. ask this question in memory of my beloved 770.

I will try to work at least one of these very contentious issues into the conversation, but please note, "what is the proposed support timeline of Fremantle" is not directly related to Nokia / community interaction. Sure, it has a direct bearing on us, but I think I will ask something along the lines of, "Would Nokia consider giving end-of-life versions of Maemo to the community to maintain? Or does Nokia expect the community to exclusively use parallel versions of Maemo, like Mer, if they wish to take control after Nokia ends support?"