Roger's posts are the ones that don't make my head reel. He MUST be elected :-)

Guys, you're mis-reading me. I did once chair a standards group and calmly brought together four warring corporations to produce something useful, but that was a one-off for me.

This situation isn't like that. I'm so close to losing my patience with Nokia.

Nokia talks about a cohesive community (look at the title of this thread) yet they divide it into us and them in the most patronising way.

Quim has asked for "concrete and specific". I've posted my request for "concrete and specific" reassurance, and if I don't get it then I'm out of here.

Nokia has spent bucketloads of money on open source, but don't appear to "get" how to make open source work for them.

They keep calling the N97 their pocket computer, which makes me wonder what the hell the N900 is supposed to be. OPK did it again in a Times interview today. In the same interview he keeps going on about how paid Ovi subscriptions are going to be Nokia's salvation. Well I sure hope the N900 isn't going to be carrier-locked with a compulsory Ovi subscription.

A lot is being made about the fancy-schmancy all-touch front end, but people will see through it. Just about every review of the HTC Touch says "TouchFlo is great; shame about Windows Mobile underneath". The same reviewers will say "Nokia-clutter is great; shame it's just Linux underneath". Meanwhile we can't even be confident about something as basic as whether the device will have the right kind of I/O to make it usable for our needs.

Nokia is really coming at this from exactly the wrong angle. Instead they should be pushing the power of the platform. The N900 should be Nokia's high-power "internet and a computer in your pocket" device, not their "anything iPhone can do we can try to do two years later" device.

Regards,
Roger

As for the "computer" labeling, they've been doing that for their N-series for some time (either they don't like the usual smartphone moniker, or just trying to one-up the competition in naming), so I don't think that's an indication that S60 is taking over Maemo's role.

As for the rest... I'm substantially in agreement, but maybe I just haven't been around long enough to be properly pessimistic; I do see Nokia as improving with regards to open-source. (Now when the best you can say is "improving", it's a sign that they'd better be improving. But I think they are headed in the right direction regarding open-source, for now.)

I think the hijacking of this thread from a community-focused one to a Nokia-bashing one is for two reasons:

1. Quim posted an interesting and thought-provoking message from all he's learned in his years of being an open source contributor. Unfortunately, in this community he's better known as the public face of Maemo Software; and so it was viewed as an attack on the "community" from the evil, heartless bastards at Nokia who delight in watching us innocents squirm in ignorance as they hoard all their gadgety knowledge goodness. Or something.
2. The post struck a nerve. We know that this community isn't as organised, successful or productive as the iPhone, Symbian, Blackberry, WinMob or Pandora communities. We know we shouldn't sit around grumbling, and instead scratch our itches. We know we shouldn't bad mouth developers' efforts here rather than raising specific issues in their bug trackers or via email.

So, instead of confronting the harsh reality (and why we're not as successful as those other communities is only interesting in finding out how to solve it), we degrade into yet another "but it's all Nokia's fault" thread. Which has raised lots of good points, but they're a) off-topic for this thread and b) probably already known.

I'm going to put my money where my mouth is, and I suggest everyone else do the same, name a project in the Maemo community they're going to support in an ongoing way. This could be testing, feedback, bugs, patches, documentation, website assistance - whatever.

My pet project is going to be: MediaBox

I said this at the beginning of the thread, but apparently it went unnoticed: This thread isn't about Nokia!

Although everybody involved here seems entirely insistent on ignoring that fact, and instead of looking at where we can improve ourselves, immediately jumps to blaming Nokia. Which just makes us look childish and silly.

In a thread that isn't about Nokia, but about seeking ways to better community involvement in community open source development, this is a bizarre ultimatum to be making. . . .

Level heads indeed.


*It seems to me this shirt/hat concept escapes the notice of a lot of people, so I'm going to try to explain it. When you're working in a position at a company like Nokia and interacting with a large community like this, sometimes things you'll be doing, you'll be doing as a Nokia representative and other times you'll be doing them not as a Nokia representative and employee, but as a 100%-pure community member (qgil is just as much a community member as you or anybody else). Thus, he's wearing his "community" shirt (or hat), and responding as if he's wearing his Nokia shirt is both unproductive and silly. It's impossible to work in a community as a Nokia employee if everything you say must be as if it came directly from Nokia.

So far, every time I've been tempted to hit the QUOTE button, I scroll on to see something he said that I would have said. More often, he expresses it much better that I would have!

So far, I've really appreciated his point of view and I'm in complete agreement.

Aye!

I can sympathize with Quim's wardrobe dilemma. I played the role of voluntary Nokia-community interface for some time before he and other Nokia folks agreed to create accounts here... and I've taken my share of beatings as well. It ain't easy wearing the red shirt!

I think you'll find it's about the community around Nokia's products.

Given maemo isn't really the popular platform outside of these devices yet, and these devices don't often get used with something other than maemo (drivers are a good reason, I'd suppose), I think that it might be natural to see a lot of friction in a thread like this one.

(Experimental ->) Unstable -> Testing -> Stable.

And, this goes very slowly. SSU are like security.debian.org and perhaps some backports for reliability and stability. But for sure not full backports also heavily providing functionality. One must be careful with the latter; these for sure introduce all kind of regressions. So this is not viable for a Stable tree such as Diablo. Hence; SSU.

If you wish to compare to Debian then every Maemo version is a new Debian version with a Debian Unstable and Debian Testing tree internal.

What you appear to wish for is those trees public?

(See my comment about the function of SSU.)

You should have your SDK ready to apply the patches, and then use APT to recompile. On a desktop or server this is easy, and creating the package goes fast. On a mobile/embedded device this is a bit harder. Most people here do not do this; they wait on the packager of the source to fix this. This is our choice. We, as community, can have something like Mer and use this as base and backport from Maemo directly instead. Even then, you will want stable device and Testing is relatively Stable but not suitable for mission critical usage.

Changelogs would be welcome. On a Debian(-like) system you do not know this either unless you install e.g. apt-listchanges. BTW, apt-listbugs is also very useful.

The reason why this matters a lot on Maemo is because users modify the core system a lot.

One is free to do this, but Nokia provides a disclaimer as well. You're on your own when you do this.

A lot of Maemo is open source; this is open source spirit. This is much different than TiVo. Nokia is opening more and more, and alternatives such as Mer have less obstactles so you can get something equiv to a public Debian Testing.

I, for one, will judge based on the number of closed source components in Maemo Fremantle and the progression made with the closed source components in current tablets. I'll also thank those who put the effort in Mer from my heart because they're part of the alternative 'ROM' making it happen.

Compared to what happened with Sharp Zaurus this situation looks much more bright... there, we had to use Linux 2.4 for a long time, and had no changes in the firmware/ROM at all!

Yes, the Maemo Community and how we can better our participation in open source projects in this community. That doesn't make a Nokia-bashing festival productive or appropriate.

Natural or not, it's still silly and counter-productive to the point Quim started this thread for. More than anything, it illustrates exactly our problem.