Notices

Not quite the same - think of Maemo as a Linux distribution.

No. Any derivative of GPL'd work must itself be GPL I believe.

BTW, I am not a lawyer ;-)

You're right that a derivative must be GPL, but wrong if you were asserting that it's not allowed to profit by selling the GPL software.

However, having sold it, you have to provide the buildable source code too, and you can't prevent your customer from giving it all to everyone else if they want to... or even selling it themselves.

Anyways, it would be great if Nokia took GPL and LGPL solutions made by people here, and either packaged them as is or extracted the juicy bits to use in core Maemo apps and system services.

It goes both ways then, because we can extract the juicy bits produced by Nokia in those same apps and services. That's the beauty of the GPL and LGPL - they strongly support juicy bits being taken, improved, and used to make newer better software all round.

What they said ^^^^

jjx. Sorry about the brief reply, it obviously left a bit to the imagination. As you already clarified, I was meaning to infer (unsuccessful), that while Nokia could profit monetarily from GPL'd code, they couldn't profit exclusively. That is, they wouldnt' be able to take it and claim it as their own, and any modifications that they made would eventually be released back into the wild anyways.

I guess I should not have used "more elegant." What I should have said was: "well integrated into the N900." Instead of a stand-alone program, I was thinking of one that is, for example, integrated into Conversations.

They can always take the core functionality and integrate it in.

mms is just the perfect example that the commuity should take care of
because then nokia can spend those resources on stuff that I need
(0% of the people i know is using mms)