well nokia is one of the most wonderful companies out there. Their motto has always been to empower the user unlike apple.

But who said it is not profitable enough already to sustain itself?

And why does a "niche" has always to be considered some naïve dream? Why is it considered an inherent waste of time for big companies? Hey, with the mass mainstream market saturated with iPhones, it might perhaps be easier and more profitable for Nokia to take some niche than just focus on that larger and more difficult fight. You must choose your battles to survive the war!...

I won't doubt it if you tell me the NITs are not much profitable yet. And I bet they aren't profitable enough to award yachts and mansions to all Nokia executives and shareholders. But do we know for a fact if they are "wasting" money in Maemo right now, and they would have to make drastic changes in the project because of this?

Maybe this feeling that we currently have to do something or else Memo and the NIT will fail is totally artificial. Maybe we are conditioned to think that closed source is right and open source is inherently some impossible naïve dream because it is so beautiful. But I question this idea.

This is questionable by itself, but in the NITs case is even worse. It is difficult to see how a software company can make money with free software, but Nokia is not only a software company, hardware is quite important to them. Maybe Maemo is profitable enough right not as it is because the company is making enough money with the hardware (they say it sold more than they imagined). If this is the case, we should not be worried about making some extra effort to grow its user base "or else".

Maybe it's not the case, maybe Maemo will in fact fail unless we are successful in making it mainstream. But how do we know that? It makes no sense to just be admired with the number of iPhone users and developers and be afraid to be smashed by it somehow.

Why can't we just be happy with the way we are, this small little happy sustainable and profitable niche? Why do we have to be concerned about reaching the stars and rivaling the iPhone? Why become something else entirely?? Are we thinking about what we want for us in our lives, or are we seeking fame an glory and hordes of mindless fanboys to be part of our gang? If it's profitable enough already (perhaps the release of a fourth table is a proof of that), why do we care if our neighbors and Aunt Tille uses it or not? What do we care what other people think?

As for Nokia, I imagine they would in fact like to take a bite out of the Apple pie. But we can't know what they plan. They probably wish Maemo becomes good enough to beat Android and w1dowze in the consumer's minds. But it's up to Nokia to take steps in this direction, and not us. Or do we believe the tablets are so bad right now that all it users are in the verge of migrating to other devices?

It's Nokia's call to make a decision like: "Maemo is not making enough money as it is, let's just make some iPhone clone instead." We, the Maemo community, shouldn't care much about this, we shouldn't raise the subject from nothing. Unless Nokia comes top-down with some news like this, it makes no sense for us to be arguing about what we should do to suddenly "take the mainstream" (like Linux will one day "take the desktop")

Now, don't think I am saying it's all perfect right now. I do agree there are some deficiencies in the Maemo community right now that should be fixed. Somebody suggested in this or another thread that we might pick up some ideas in how Debian and other distros work in managing their packages. That is a very good idea. The Maemo garage right now is just some kind of Freshmeat, and not at all like Debian where there is a project leader et cetera. This sure is lacking in Maemo. It doesn't feel like a distro right now, but more like "a mere bag of packages"...

This may be because we see Nokia as leading Maemo, but nobody would like to "work for free" for Nokia, following project manager's decisions like in Debian and others. Perhaps we will see this kind of stronger organization build up around Mer? Who knows...

And I am not against Nokia hiring someone to make a number of applications for NIT users to buy. I don't mind if Microzoft releases "Maemo Office". I only hope we can always opt out such things, and that counter-piracy concerns doesn't end up making life a hell.

Sorry again for long post. It's Friday night and just had a few drinks!. I thought a lot about the subject because I was reading the thread at the bar, with my tablet you know...

It took me some time to realize an ocarina program is something inherently multi-touch, so it won't happen anytime soon.

But I might still try some other kind of synth, not much different from the Theremin app currently available.

So many ideas... some good, some great, some bad.

But I just keep thinking... it's all "me too". Nokia, Maemo, et al... all of this discussion should have happened last year so something would be in place this year, if not right now.

I want to see something come from these discussions, and I feel that it will. Some serious great ideas, discussions and insight into what's wrong with other offerings.

I can't wait. And that's my main problem... waiting.

Now... for me, to entice me to develop on Maemo, I already develop on OS X and Windows. Rarely do I develop in Linux now.

But as it stands, I'd develop if it were as accessible as XCode was. And despite my epic amount of hate for it, .NET Visual Studio is very accessible and downright intuitive. I can't replicate everything in Mono yet. And since my switch to mostly Adobe Flex... well, I know that means no Linux either. But if you had some IDE - yes, IDE - that also had commandline, you'd bridge the gap.

Sure... I could write Python by hand all day if I wanted to. But I don't. I could fire up the GCC and compile up via commandline if I chose. But sometimes, I wouldn't. There's no Unity 3D out for the platform - a 3D engine that's easily deployable - and that's a problem (I like to make 3D games as well).

So what do I have to look forward to on this platform?

So far, I'm not seeing it. And I want to. Badly.

Regardless... good luck. Can't wait to see what comes from it.

I'm having a hard enough time getting the SDK we DO have up and running at all, sadly enough.

If interested, please go to

Applications You Wish Were Ported From Other Platforms

on the wiki :-) and edit to your heart's content.

I bet 10p that within a couple of weeks it's full of superfluous and ill-thought out suggestions like "wine" or "someone should make a PS3 emulator".

Back in 2005 there was exactly this kind of wiki page (which went along with the application catalogue wiki page). It got noisy and useless pretty quickly :-(

i fear they may be right, altho they are using it to shore up their own ego more then apply a logical argument.

i fear that multitasking confuses people, especially when there is a gui involved so that one may never have a indication that anything is being done.

this is, i suspect, why viruses and so on work. people do not have the "sysadmin" attitude of looking at the task manager/top/whatever, and read up on the names of the entries listed.

i cant help wonder how many only have a spreadsheet or text document open on their desktop all day, and use the computer as a typewriter with unlimited correction fluid...

for them, a task going on in the background, could just as well be going on at the other side of the world, they would not know, or care, about the difference.

i ones read that elderly people, ones being shown the basics, found the command line of a unix environment informative. This mostly as they could tell when something was going in (no blinking cursor) and when a task was sent the the background, they would told it was waiting there when they did something else.

thing is, while our brain is a multiprocessing machine, it constantly scans sensory inputs for potential dangers, we are not aware of that. We are mostly focused on the one thing we are working on at the moment, and studies have shown that multitasking will actually degrade our performance more often then not, as it takes time for the brain to bring itself back up to speed about what was done on a task previously.

So when a teen is studying with music and tv on 11, its more about applying white noise to the senses, rather then distractions.

when one speak about a wish for multitasking on the iphone, what it seems one is often really asking for, is for the apps one leave, to remember their state, so that one can leave a ssh shell open, pop over to a pdf or web page, read up on some commands on wants to give, and then pop back into the ssh session to enter said commands. The iphone fails here, as it closes down the ssh session when one leave, and needs to be reconnected before one can continue (potentially dumping all one have done unless one is running screen at the other end).

so multitasking is more a case of telling the computer "hold that thought", then of really trying to do multiple things at the same time. At best, the other "tasks" are supplementing ones ability to do a "primary" task.

the thing is that while we are attempting to replace the secretary, librarian and other jobs with a computer, the people performing those jobs are potentially creative, and attempts at making the computer creative have so far been poor and annoying (clippy anyone?).

There's a lot of truth to that. Multitasking for multitasking's sake on such a limited platform (CPU, RAM and most importantly Battery) can be a loose cannon. And going by iPhone's example, they have actually enabled 'multitasking' (or rather background execution) for some of the most common tasks:

- Email checking
- Music\podcast playback
- Application update

There are also a class of apps that are apparently been better run as external services that delivers 'push notification' only when there's something new:

- RSS reader, social web clients and the likes
- IM apps are almost usable in this setup, because they are idle and consuming some resources for most of the time

And the true apps that require multitasking, mostly with streaming:

- terminals
- downloader (p2p, media streamer, file downloader)
- live constant chat (irc, conference mode IM)

So if you want to boast about multitasking, to make it the showcase feature of the platform, make sure you use the right class of apps to present.. otherwise they'd just be idle drain of resources on your limited device.

True. But Nokia *IS* in OpenSource business and with each iteration it is more in. With each generation there is more code opened and more transparency with development (although you could probably not notice it due to all whining here ).

Nokia apparently decided that OpenSource isn't bad for business and goes with it.

Maybe they noticed that in global scale there is enough people interested in OpenSource products that they can maintain whole line of products?

BTW - according to recent article on BBC site about Red Hat OpenSource is now about of 20% of global IT market.