No, that's not it. In fact, it's basically been under open development since the beginning and everyone involved has responded quite positively to stuff like this.

Perhaps these people would be better off to just DO something or slightly shift their focus into an adjacent area.
Waiting for a new device/OS version is a lame excuse for not starting something now (at least that's what I've begun to tell myself :-). There are more than enough things people could do to improve the Maemo environment and enduser exeprience that don't depend on knowing all about the latest API or hardware feature.
Patience is a virtue :-)

Yeah, and while they read all the good and bad comments, the software gets written by itself. I'm completely with Novell on that one. Do it first, read comments later, add something if it is good. If there's no clear goal you'll end up with a big lump of unmaintainable patches glued together with spit.

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until the Nokia brass gets it:

The Nokia hardware product development process is broken.

It's bad enough with cell phones, where chronic (and easily avoidable) delays kept the sexy and high-potential N75 at the outer edges of AT&T's radar. Nokia consistently has failed to deliver promised product in working order on schedule.

I am not revealing anything proprietary here that will get what's left of my severance check pulled. This is public knowledge.

Now, if it's that bad for conventional product with a stable OS, imagine what it's like to deliver something on the bleeding edge.

I was on the front lines with the N800. I noticed hardware concerns months before launch (for which I had high responsibility) and when I expressed them, I was told by management that they were not an issue. But-- they became one several days before I had to ship 200 some-odd pristine, perfectly-functioning units to CES.

Those of us in product QA were constantly frustrated by silly development and release hang-ups. I'll have to avoid detailing that but surely people here can imagine.

Bottom line, if the maemo-to-hardware wedding hopes to result in a consumer honeymoon, PRODUCT RELEASE GAPS HAVE TO BE FILLED. Period. No gaps, but overlaps.

I know that many people in Nokia get this, and want it as much as my team did. But it's still broken. I'd love to come back and help fix it.

Most developers aren't writing code 100% of the time. Most really good developers aren't writing code 66% of the time.

There's an obvious balance to strike, but the reductio ad absurdum retort to your argument is that a sole developer shouldn't even seek the opinion of a single peer, because that'd detract from the development.

I don't dispute that. However, I also know that a single developer will do something better after having solicited as much intelligent feedback possible as early as possible - as long as they know what the requirements are well enough to know to whom to listen.

It's sheer arrogance on the part of a company that they know better than the hundreds of people passionate enough about a product to be developing it for free.

Looks like we're still trying to find that necessary balance...

Ok I'll give you that. Let me rephrase it to "Any usable progress that is actually *available* is happening in the Mer and Ubuntu projects". I have no illusions that Nokia hasn't obsoleted the n800 and n810.

I personally don't think Fremantle will amount to anything, in critical mass. Unless it runs as distributed on older devices. Fortunately the trickledown will certainly help those other projects.

All my opinion of course. But I've been fooled once, and I'm not buying another NIT, as nice as my n800 is.

Whilst at the same time, they open up its source code, accept patches and move the original developer on to other tasks? I don't think anything as specific as you suggest is going on here.

Hildon Application Manager is practically a shining example of Nokia open source; apart from:

• Fremantle plans aren't shared.
• Some new features were implemented without any discussion on its mailing list (although not many, because most open developers got involved after it had mostly been complete)
• Diablo patches were applied (and are shipping in Mer) to massively improve the user experience but Nokia doesn't have the processes in-place to ship them outside of a monolithic release.

With the clarified rule in Maemo 5 of "everything below UI layer open, differentiating applications closed" (the so-called 80/20); existing open applications like modest and h-a-m have, I think suffered - just when they were getting external open source developers involved. It's unfortunate as these end-user facing applications are the ones which make a good gateway in to lower-level hacking: people can see something which directly impacts them and make a small change to fix it.

regarding openness in products from day one.

if nokia had said "we want to strip down and start completely from scratch in order to reboot the maemo product line"
whether or not it would be justified, practically every single person here would be up in arms and it would never get underway.
its not the sort of project they would undertake.

also, if nokia had just splashed out serious amounts of money on an unwritten project we would also think they were mad.

its a lose lose situation here for nokias commercial involvement in a hobbiest OS.
Sure, they have direction and can see certain elements hitting off, but on the whole it should be *US* the community who do the planning work and putting everything together.

Only once that work starts and gains momentum would I see it as beneficial for nokia to step up and support those projects - which surprisingly it has!

its no use us pontificating in here about projects that aren't yet under our microscope and instead we have been concentrating on whats to hand.

with that in mind, anyone is welcome to come and lend a hand in the liqbase playground (its more like a building site at the moment tho lol)

I have it up on an invite only git server and as long as one thing is adhered to I do not mind who in the community comes and has a look/gets involved:

there will not be a full release until its ready and stable.

I want the users to have the best experience possible and it should be completely functional and usable by my grandma.

it works nicely on 8x0, and I've spent the last few months taking the monolithic app and inverting it into a library to allow completely standalone apps to be created using the nice graphics and bits.
call into #liqbase on freenode

That's the noblest goal I've seen here in a while - fantastic!

Maybe we can make that the rallying cry for Maemo overall...