As requested, the posts in this thread were moved here from another thread in which they developed into an off-topic sub-thread. Please continue the discussion here.

Criticism 101:

http://tabulacrypticum.wordpress.com...teps-for-2010/

one thing i found interesting about your blog post was who commented... and how. seems there's a dangerous sense of disillusion among well-respected community members - contributors, that is. (and i'm not talking about the first comment )

i was really surprised to see these names under the bitter comments.

something's wrong up there in finland.

My complaints... the missing elements...

- Release early, release often?
- Transparency?
- Good communication
- Community involvement

There's also the irony of having less interoperability/backward-compatibility between Maemo OS releases compared to other (proprietary) smartphone OSes. And how the closed/restricted drivers and core/build-in apps are locking down the N900's potential and capability, rendering it inferior to non-open(source|standard|platform) smart phones.

For better or for worse, that's fairly standard in the open source world though. Keeping crufty, old library APIs around makes less sense when the source to applications is available for quick patching and recompiling.

However, you're right that Maemo has already lost both closed source and open source applications to developers moving on. And should MeeGo succeed in its goal of attracting loads of commercial, closed source developers, the pressure for stable, backwards-compatible APIs will grow.

Texrat that is a nice post, good example of constructive criticism.

I will comment about "MeeGo-Harmattan" and its community edition for the N900 in their threads this evening (now I can't). About the rest, I will make sure the right people sees your post. Although the issues are known, it is useful to see them all listed at once.

Benny could not get closer to the truth and i admire him for saying what he said and the sooner people who swear by Nokia realise that the maker has sunk us with the N900 the better.
Far far too many on here will not allow anyone to bad mouth the maker without throwing nasty comments and sooner the better that everyone realises people are entitled to constructive critism without being shouted down.
I am SICK of the stupid coment "you should have done your research properly" as it impossible to know Nokia would fail as they have done and keep doing so on the N900.
Many many things are missing and wrong here and on this forum we need to establish right from wrong and the first thing wrong is the way these "fanboys" present themselves to the rest of the community.
I am just out of a ban because i was set up by a mod and his friend and all i was trying to do was point out something worthy to carry on with a particular modification.
Nokia has failed us and is clear now for anyone to see if they only open up and be honest to themselves and the need for comradeship AGAINST the actions or failures of Nokia is now more needed than ever before because it is now VERY clear that the only place on this planet real progress is made for the N900 is on this community as it is very well established and recognised for the good part i might add !.
the OP of this thread is actually very clearly saying things are seriously wrong here and he is getting shouted down by the same crew that shout down any critism along with the moderator in there favour.
When this changes and people actually get it together in a TEAM EFFORT will be when things start to happen for the good of the N900.
In the week i was banned i settled down to some serious work on usb otg and in fact accomplished it with ease simply because i was prepared to open up and do some modifications to the hardware that Nokia obviously deliberatly sabotaged because they wanted the usb to include the damm charging instead of a seperate charge port which took away the otg possibilities.
Get your act together as a team on here and you will get somewhere, fight it out and it will go on relentless forever and a day with little or no progress being made.
The crying shame of this community is the relentless bickering and who knows best instead of joining together on everything.
A week out for me made me see what is going on here and i tell you it is NOT nice to read some of it !!.
Ok i have said my piece for now.

Oh yeah, there are pros and cons for being too quick (moving away from legacy for th enew) and too slow (milking the old system for as long as possible for whatever reason, not only financial); striking a proper balance here is a very tricky act.

...but... combined with the closed drivers & core apps makes the community immobilized and powerless, when faced with such issue. It's not an apt-get upgrade away, like on desktop *nixes (well, whatever the rpm and other pkg mgr's equivalents may be).

Although it may be easy to stamp the 'too little, too late' possibility on this issue... as long as the developer support for MeeGo is as good as /better than Android's & Apple's, then I think they should be ok. What with the (generally) nibblet sizes of mobile apps, advances in app development tech and a big big financial carrot to be dangled for to keep those involved motivated... they can reasonably catch up, like Android is doing to iOS.

Actually, I would be very happy to read about that, too.
Although I still think that Harmattan should not have been renamed to "MeeGo"- this will only cause severe misunderstanding from consumers, and a similar flamewar on meego.com as it is now on maemo.org.

Okay, I understand that it is a "MeeGo device" by the meaning that it can run apps built on top of the "MeeGo API", but the average user will just not understand why the app that runs on one MeeGo won't run on the other.
(EDIT: 95% of the users won't even understand the differences between the x86 and the ARM version, either.)

I would recommend a much less direct marketing approach.

• Either keep the name "Maemo 6" or some other name that is not confusable with MeeGo, but indicates that is is related to MeeGo someway
• You could add a sticker to the back of the device claiming it is "MeeGo certified" or such, instead of changing the name
• Actually, you could also merge Harmattan with the "real" MeeGo and call it MeeGo
• My favourite and simplest solution: implement an .rpm package manager on Harmattan alongside with the current one. Problem solved.

Great post Texrat. One request I have though - can you make the font on "Silence on Flash 10.1" 10x bigger and bold type?