considering the fact that financing is (at least partially) guaranteed to end of 2012, I would stick to that date - i.e. treat is as a deadline. After that, it may, or may not be prolonged - not quite comfortable situations.

So, lets stick mentally to this date, and prepare everything before. After that, we may not need to utilize Nokia money. There are no free dinners - using Nokia fund bound us a little. If we can prepare ourself, we can become legal entity with raised funds before financial-plug event.

And, it can be done without antagonizing us with Nokia. I think they also would be much happy, to not be "cutting" part - bot PR and economical side, it's better for both us and them, to "maturate" our legal entity and separate gracefully from our side.

Why?

Seriously, why do you think the Council needs to be "authorised" to do that?

I wrote on maemo-community:

If there's a sufficient number of people willing to do the work, and I mean real work, and they are elected by the community, why does the community need to "authorise" them at all?

There's a lot of people talking about this, but who's got a economically viable business plan; and enough time/resources/friends to pull it off? I'll vote for them; but the general tone seems to be one of hoping that someone will emerge from our ranks to save us. Who though?

The last election mustered exactly five candidates. The Community Council get regularly slagged off (fairly & unfairly). A legal entity with cash will require a lot more work than five volunteers carrying on as they did before and facilitating intra-, and extra-, community communications.

It's all very well and good if we sit around and vote yes, "yes, someone should go and create an NFP and come up with organisational bye-laws for a platform which... is... dead." But unless there's actually someone who is willing, and able, to do the work - it's just navel gazing.

The talk of a resurrection of Maemo on new devices is the same pipedreams I saw in the Acorn/RISC OS world. The hope of the same UI on a new base; porting forward the existing codebase; patches and enhancements to the existing one.

This is cool stuff. It's fun stuff. But it's not going to change the world, and the number of people will only drop off over time. Those remaining will be dedicated. They will be enthusiastic. They will be stubborn (in a good way). They will be having fun. Anything which doesn't recognise this is either wishful thinking or someone who has a business plan they're not sharing :-)

For me, someone wanting to become council in *this* election is someone that acknowledge responsibility for "maintaining" metamorphosis to legal entity. At least, i'm not going to vote for ones that don't want to

Seriously thought, for such a large community, it's easier to choose few *willing* volunteers. Of course no one will stop anyone willing to organize outside council system - or even fork open parts of maemo.

Ho ever, council system, together with transforming into *legal* entity, seems to sane approach. Especially, that we want to talk with Nokia about very important thing - mirroring Nokia repos. If I recall correctly (correct me if not) - this is only one thing that we "want" from Nokia for real, we can live without other parts (like "maemo" name).

Isn't a tie-up with Canonical feasible? They got the money and open source love. Kubuntu's being ported to the N900 and TMO's got the largest number of testers, maybe that would be enough for Canonical to lend a helping hand... I just hope you guys don't mind a change of name. No more "maemo". Maybe something like mobilelinux.org would be used. I've been thinking about this community's future too cause it's one of the biggest reasons why I bought this phone (the open source community, that is)...

I just saw that this thread is a Sticky! It makes me even sadder... Makes feel this is coming really soon

Don't read so much into that. I made it a sticky because it was such a hot topic and I wanted to give it the proper attention. But as many have said, there is no real rush to act. We are just sharing thoughts.

thanks for the clarification.

so how about Canonical then? seems like they've been able to make money without totally depending on selling apps and hardware so maybe they'll consider adopting us.

Debian is perhaps better option.

See how they react when we propose to add in Maemo GTK+ packages .. (yes, the one with Hildon spices)

Texrat,

maybe this is worth a clarification?
on the election thread i read (posted originally by you i think and confirmed by other (Council?) members) that NOKIA's decision whether or not they would continue to finance maemo.org wasn't made yet.

what is NOKIA's position?

• they have paid the bills 'til (end?) 2012
  period
  thus no further comment leaving the possibility open that it's business as usual (for now).
• they have paid the bills 'til (end?) 2012, and after that they have to think about it.
• they have paid the bills 'til (end?) 2012, but don't seem too enthusiastic to continue afterwards.