I agree with that assesment, too. The problem I see that I feel the situation is presented as a black-and-white choice when in fact it isn't. The developer monetary reward is a question of business model, not freedom/freeness of their applications. I think that the appstore has unfortunately caused a bit of tunnel-vision for a lot of people, thinking that such an approach is the only and/or best one, disregarding it's only a facet of a very carefully planned ecosystem not necessarily yielding the same success/results if directly transplanted to another ecosystem, especially if it's anything like our NITs.

@zerojay: I think GeraldKo is referring to cases like the Zaurus. Sure, the Zaurus might have died, but the legacy (and Angstrom ) lives on.

Personally, I think the surrounding infrastructure is what makes this difficult in Maemo land. Hopefully, come Harmattan (or whatever it is...), Maemo will have its entire development pipeline through QtCreator (and done nicely), with easy support for compiling / testing directly on the device with no extra steps.

As for the web end of things, frankly I find Garage.maemo.org really ugly and pointless, save for a few neat features like the news feed. I would be really delighted if Nokia moved to Launchpad, for example, which actually makes itself desirable by connecting different projects, distributions, bug reports and support requests under a single easy interface

Oh, and as for development platform: Nokia should take a tip from Palm. They are fresh on the stage with WebOS, and their platform made me smile. They have a Debian package tested for Ubuntu specifically (it being really popular and all). After installing, a single terminal command (as a regular user) pulls open VirtualBox with a fully functioning WebOS emulator.

Then I looked at Maemo again:
http://maemo.org/development/sdks/maemo_4-1-2_diablo/
That site demonstrates what Nokia is doing here: They are running on some delusion that everyone who wants to do software development is willing to spend a day reading through convoluted documentation to set up an SDK so that they can maybe compile a little command line app for their tablet. They assume that developers don't like easy stuff, that everyone writes in Assembly and anything higher level was developed by evil commies to destroy our minds. Oh, and that developers don't read, so documentation is useless.

Then I looked back at Palm:
http://developer.palm.com/

Okay, which one would YOU build software with?

I should also say: development generally is customer driven, with the authors being the first customers and scratching their own itches.

Yes, and you can argue that the process can be made friendlier/more approachable/whatever, but at the end of the day it's the only workable one. I certainly don't want the authors of every single package in Extras to start spamming me for suggestions, nor do I expect them to have the time to deal with the random responses they'd get anyway.

Requiring some user engagement and participation isn't a bad thing IMHO.


Hm, maybe the application manager could some day provide some sort of a feedback wizard for sending user input back to the developers.

I think we need to constantly consider the possibility, however remote, because ignoring it leads to hubris.

(Off-topic: Picklesworth, I am quoting your post in http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=30799&page=6 )

Well, I'm probably just Freudian-projecting some repressed thoughts of myself onto you then, so I apologize...

Funny. Palm's Developer site looks a lot like some of our original ideas for the m.o site.

Tim

Er... *slowly steps away* it's ok, mate. It's ok, really!

A little (interesting) tangent:

"Tr.im to Go Open Source, Community Owned"

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...nity_owned.php

Tim