i wish they did release the drivers would take along time to reverse engineer open drivers

http://wiki.maemo.org/Why_the_closed_packages lists a few things, also Stskeeps is working on listing openness on a per-package basis, see http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2010...-pr11-and.html

After reading your links i found an obvious way forward in the future development of maemo but Nokia would certainly land themselves in hot water if as a company it ceased to undergo and implement changes for the better but also tried to stop by not making open any source code needed for the future of its own creation !
then the route anyone would obviously take to start with will come under the open development/why the closed packages , ie:
Requesting the opening of closed components

If you want a Nokia closed component to be open, please see Open_development/Licensing_change_requests

The chances of success of your proposal will probably depend on how it fits within the following reasons for a relicensing:

1. Fixing a bug: The package is in non-free although it looks like it's actually an open piece of software. In this case forget about Brainstorm and simply file a bug and CC maemo.org distmaster on carsten.munk at gmail.com.
2. Nurturing application development: There is a strong argument proving that opening a component will bring more and better apps for end users.
3. Spread of Maemo driven technologies to other platforms: A component fits well in a gap existing in other Linux/OSS based projects and there is a concrete interest on collaborating and contributing to a component if it's opened.
4. Community maintenance: A component is receiving low attention from the official maintainers even if it has high attention from the community and there are developers volunteering to contribute to it if the source code is available.
5. Better architecture: Probably covered by 2 or 3 but just in case. A closed component is sitting in the midle of open components making things more difficult that needed to developers interested in that area.
indeed guys like yourself are very important to end user as a way forward with Nokia.
There is obviously some problem Nokia is not telling anyone so lets just wait and see what happens in the near future.
Andre please keep up the good work !!! very very usefull information in those links !!! THANKYOU.

what about symbian 3 duel boot??

remember symbian 3 is open source now

if we couldnt port the whole o/s what about some of the phonebook features like groups etc

it will support qt as well so maybe some qt parts of the o/s will be able to be transfered iam thinking nokia maps will probably be qt on symbian in the future

its going to get very intresting over the next few months thats for sure

Yep couldnt agree with you more !

Problem is if reverse engineered components leading to complete open source i am sure Nokia would clamp down and do something about it so i think pointless to even think about reverse engineering plus as you said the cost is massive these days.
Better that Nokia land themselves in deep water so they could then be forced to let it out ha.... nice thought.

i am not talking about _packages_ (or software other than drivers).
it's not maemo i care about (i'd very much prefer a proven good and independend distribution, debian, instead of the crippled stuff nokia provides and abandons as their fancy takes them), but the hardware.
i guess the basic parts work out of the box, but what about cameras, sensors, gsm, wlan, ...?

on what legal grounds?
reverse engineering, if following certain rules, is fully legal.
nokia's policy in the question of maemo6/meego has, imo, a lot of people made distrustful of nokia's intentions to protect customers' investments.
i paid a lot of money for a device i don't want to fall in the "no fixes/updates for crucial parts" trap with, as i have seen happen to other hardware (fully) supported by closed drivers only (have a look at amd/ati's policy against their customers who do not buy a new graphics adaptor every few months).

after all, clean room implementations of reverse engineered drivers are an important part of the linux kernel since its very beginnings -- and it allows nokia to abandon products while pointing to open projects continuing development.
nokia adopting open source is not a matter of doing good, but of reducing costs (what would be maemo.org for if not helping nokia cutting down costs of customer support?). and if open source projects help provide fixes/updates after eol, nokia gains customers (because they can always point to o/s projects prolonging the lifetime of the products) and saves costs.

It wont run iPhone OS as it is about as closed as they come and only carries support for the iPhone hardware, is a big no no no on that one, and Android is a flavour of linux, yes, and has already been seen in the wild dual booted on an N900, check out a google search and you will find. But as stated above, if some of the hardware is closed, and remains closed, you will never get full functionality out of any other OS as no drivers will be available.

Pete

I very much doubt Nokia could even think about "abandoning" Maemo so you will just have to wait like the rest of us to see just what Nokia will do with the N900.