I don't have any problem with people making strong cases to Nokia for opening the devices up more. As has already been noted, progress HAS been made on that front. But some of the posts take an "all or nothing tack" and sorry, that's going to meet with resistance.

Nokia is trying to make money off a commercial product while opening as much as they see fit to outside, open source development. There are other platforms out there with differing degrees of this approach or, alternatively, some form of closed system. Pick the platform that best suits your ideology, wants and needs.

If you like the Maemo concept enough to post passionately here in favor of it opening further, again, make a good case for it but omit the bashing. People will listen. Flavor your proposals with negativity and abject criticism... and they won't so much.

But they don't own the intellectual property behind that hardware. Is that the actual crux of the complaint here?

That's probably one part of the problem, yes!
If they cannot distribute free drivers because some other company doesn't allow it, well, then I'm guessing people are trying to pressure Nokia to put pressure on that other company.

And generally, they are putting pressure on the system to make laws to protect these rights and forbid the locking down of hardware away from those who buy them.

This debate has gotten very long and they are many many facets to it but I think we're doing not too bad in addressing this important issues that seems quite important to many (we're getting to 300 posts after all...).

Well, at least I now understand more and think that Nokia will be stirring the big ship in th right direction in the future...
(Now can we get those N900 shipped? )

Sorry but you are objectively wrong here. Developers are free to decide the licenses for their software. Maemo integrates a stack of software mostly LGPL friendly, which indeed allows you to combine software freedom, integration of proprietary software and commercial distribution. Nokia is not forcing anybody to choose such licenses and actually many of these components existed before licensed that way.

If you are author of a piece of software integrated in Maemo and you disagree in the way Nokia is using your software you could find a license according to your wishes exactly. The fact is that, in general, developers of those components are overall happy about companies like Nokia using their components and contributing to their development.

If you are not a developer of those components then you have really a little ground to tell to anybody how to use a piece of software if it's being used in the licensed terms.

Now, if someone wants to bring this long thread somewhere useful please come up with specific use cases explaining what would you like to do but you can't because software component X is closed.

Be specific, be convincing finding harmony between your interests and the interests of whoever has the copyrights of the closed software you want to open and you will see.

What makes you think Nokia isn't putting pressure on those other companies? STMicro released the STLC45x specifications directly because of Nokia pressure, and I suspect Nokia is one of the biggest drivers (if not the biggest) behind TI's recent open source moves.

Commercial distribution is never an issue with Free Software as long as you follow the license you are free to sell products using them. Of course you can't just sell the raw software but you can sell a service to code it up(spread over multiple sales) or devices that run it.

Anyway I'm a strong believer of the Free Software ideology(and yes as any religion or other ideology there are things that are dogmatic to it). But I myslef draw the line at firmware usually. Firmware is only the stuff that would be baked into the ROM if companies weren't using EEPROMs(not that sometimes I wish they were using plain ROM and actually get the hardware 100% working BEFORE throwing it out to the market).

I do believe drivers should all be Free(commercially and intellectually) though I could accept firmware blobs. The reason for this is so that a user is free to update to whatever kernel they may wish as long as the driver can be recompiled for it. Thus it could use the same firmware just an updated driver in-between.

I believe that the core functionality stack should be Free Software as well. This means the middle layer with the access, apis etc. So yes lower level(kernel space), middle layer(userspace with the core functionality stack, UI toolkit(s)) should both be Free Software. For the highest layer the stuff that users see I would prefer to have it Free Software but since that could, if both lower layers are Free, be easily replaced I would have less of a problem.

I can respect companies trying to make a buck, I can respect them having trade secrets that they wish to keep closed, I can't accept having user freedom lacking due to that though.

Whatever happened to the old old adage: The customer is always right?

As for radios, 3d acceleration, location services, battery charging from some other post.

Radios should be locked down in the firmware not software. This is the simple idea that it'll be harder to bypass a firmware restriction than a software one(yes reverse engineering can happen)(even though both are technicall software).

3D acceleration - there is absolutely no sane reason for this to be locked down. Atleast the core GLES functionality should be accelerated and Free. Any additional out of spec accelerations could be written based on specs.

Location services - I can respect they are investing heavily into this, and want to keep it closed, but this should be replaceable in such a way that another component could be used. What if I want to use Google's location services integrated into the system? Or my own even? The API atleast should be made available for this so that others can replace that component.

Battery charging - or let's say power management, they consider this to be a distinguishing feature. Why not provide an open core for charging and basic power management Freely then build on top what they consider as distinguishing features? That way if someone doesn't wish to run that particular piece of software they would simply loose the benefit of their distinguishing features. But could have their own.

Well this is started to turn into rambling. /me goes away for a while

I wouldn't use the word "knockoffs" to describe them, but there are many intriguing Chinese (and not only) devices mentioned in the Competitors forum already. Since Nokia support Mer (which is already running on several of those) they probably don't think of it as such a big problem anyway.

Given that actual competing devices exist and will keep coming, does it make much difference whether they run some variant of Maemo, Moblin, Ubuntu MID etc?

Some assembly will be required to get things like USB host, FM receiver, several bluetooth profiles, wired headset buttons etc working (some of these may even not work at all, but it's too early to tell right now).

It's unfortunate that most posts against non-GPL-ed codes in this thread does not address the vendor's interest that they sound like it's coming from self-interested parties that makes use of flawed understanding of GPL\open source for their own benefit.

IMHO, you need to understand more about what's involved in producing the components in question (yes, hardware and software) to make good cases about/against them.

ps: no, I'm afraid "I understand that someone needs to make a buck" isn't sufficient to reflect your understanding of the matter. These companies are not charities that churns out hardware to support certain ideals, so let's just accept that reality and base the discussion around that.

Do not have valid cons-arguments do not allow you to distort the meaning of my words.

It is strange than you talk now than my good examples are lost among (almost) 300 posts in this tread.

And I don't know if I'll go search these, if this is to be ignored or see the meaning of my words change by people who have no valid cons-arguments.

PS: 'Cons-arguments' is the correct translation from the French word 'contre-arguments' ?