Can someone please elaborate on this

Thank you,

Nicolai

I can certainly sympathize with this position, having a fair amount of experience with Nokia myself, but I think it's worth reminding ourselves that Nokia is not a hive mind. The message we should probably be taking away from this is: "There are a lot of people inside Nokia working towards the same things you're working towards, but it's a tough battle and we need all of the help you can afford to give."

This is much the same reason I can't recommend Nokia products to friends and family (especially in the US) you can't reasonably expect Nokia to provide reasonable support for their products.

What it comes down to, I guess, is whether it's worth it to you to continue pushing the last bastion of true open source in the mobile world in the right direction, or whether it's time to throw in the towel. This is the big advantage that MeeGo (hopefully) brings, since it's not completely beholden to Nokia.

I think we should look at the practicalities. We will lose people if we just ask them to give and push, etc., without addressing their concern that effort is wasted.

Indeed, and for each person that's going to vary a bit, as it still only amounts to opinion at this point.

That's exactly it, though. Is the effort wasted? Evidently at least a few people at Nokia believe not. The message I took away from the conference is that they need us to help keep things moving in the right direction. Whether you want to fight that battle is up to you, but I'm not convinced it's futile yet.

The functionality that Nokia finds interesting to open is being opened in the context of the MeeGo project. There was a bunch of components being opened around the MeeGo launch, another wave came when MeeGo 1.1 development started and these days there is another way going on together with the MeeGo 1.2 gate open for new features.

So yes, I agree that the requests at bugs.maemo.org could be handled more proactively, with more speed and a better ratio of acceptance. Still, it is also true that the amount and quality of free software contributions pushed by Nokia during 2010 alone is massive.

After four years working at Nokia I have seen just one way of opening components that was successful: the maintainers of the software (Nokia developers or from other companies) concluded that certain functionality would be better managed through an open license, and the whole step made sense to the Nokia software strategy.

If a request doesn't ring a bell to the maintainers and/or doesn't fit in Nokia's strategy then its chances are less than slim. And even when a request fits both then a dose of patience might be needed due to development priorities, release calendars...

This is no surprise to anybody involved in serious platform development, and this is perhaps why most of the open items in the queue have no vivid discussions at this point. Still "opening software" is a hot topic in certain Linux user circles and this is why I believe it gets hot here from time to time.

Conclusion for the Linux users interested: Nokia is opening a lot of valuable source code providing features that were not available in the standard Linux & free desktop stack - even if there is not much movement around some requests for opening legacy components.

Question is, what does this mean to current Maemo 5 apps?

Let's take the media player as an example;
MeeGo will probably have a media player on its own, that uses some different audio system (I haven't checked), but since it's based on new libraries, it might be hard to backport.

Maemo 5 has a media player that can receive so much improvements from this community, yet, Nokia decided to keep it closed so competitors can't use the code in it, not sure which competitor wants to do that...

In this case, opening Maemo 5 components in MeeGo won't really benefit everyone around here, especially those planning to stick to Maemo 5, since... well, it's a much better day-to-day OS compared to MeeGo.

I still can't fix the crappy, barely-usable calendar because apparently the interface code is precious.

Nokia has been quite consistent at telling that it has no interest opening its user experience layer - which includes the Nokia proprietary apps. It's their investment and their decision.

Taking the media player as an example, if you are interested in community engagement then please consider contributing to the MeeGo media player(s) of the Handset UX or established free software projects based on Qt like Amarok. See http://jefferai.org/2010/05/amarok-m...the-beginning/ & http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/...martphone.html

About Calendar, Nokia has made extensive contributions to the KDE's Kcal project, which powers now MeeGo's calendar backend: http://wiki.meego.com/Project/Calendar

On top of it you have the Calendar application for Handset UX, running on top of Qt and therefore with an interesting path of portability on top of Maemo 5.

Can't you see the Qt forest for the MeeGo trees?

Porting to Maemo 5 MeeGo OSS apps and their open frameworks underneath is probably easier than dealing with legacy apps developed by someone that has just opened the code and moved forward to... probably to work on MeeGo.