... waiwaiwait

I read from Quim's response (and yours) that my post on that matter was not as clear as I think it was.

I wasn't talking about whatever Nokia (or Quim) said to the council or the authors/maintainers, nor was I questioning the decision making process.

(I don't know the facts, all I understood was that something had to be done quickly, and I think what you did was not only right, but the only way to do it. Period.)

Everything I said I said about the communications towards the community after the decision had been made and the packages were removed.

And this is why I cite the above paragraph of your post:
"…the members of the community that this directly affected, the authors of said packages as well as community council…"
It's my understanding that above all, it's the end users who are affected. They are because they can no longer download an application they saw the day before. Neither the council members nor the author are affected by this as much as a single end user. You could see questions coming up in this forum about the why and the how, and it took some time before everybody knew what had happened.

So from the point of this one end user who suddenly finds a package gone, the communication was only close to ideal. No damage done, actually, but one point on the list for the next time.

... well again, I trust you made the right decision and all that... but there's yet another aspect to it:

The whole thing brings up the question of independence from Nokia. In another thread, I wrote I wasn't convinced why moving free software to the Ovi Store would be desirable. My point then was that Ovi is under Nokia's control (unwanted content, go away) while maemo.org isn't and can host packages that are not endorsed by Nokia.

Of course I knew, when I wrote this, that maemo.org financially depends on Nokia, but I haven't yet seen them exercise their power here.

Even in this particular case, I don't see what you say happened last Friday as something "Nokia did". The way I read it something had to be done anyway, and Nokia issued a kind warning before it was too late. Right?

But you see where I'm heading? The more Nokia interferes, the clearer things must be communicated. It's crucial to tell in this case that it was not Nokia who deleted the packages without asking anyone. The way Quim explained it above (Quim talks to council, they try to get in contact with maintainers, community members take down packages) makes all of this acceptable even for someone who says: "Let Nokia pay for this community if they want, but let us decide for ourselves".
And I'm deeply convinced this is important. It's important because it's one of the assets that Maemo has: A powerful community that has established equally powerful decision making processes, including one for handling a high quality community repository.

So don't make people jump to conclusions ("Nokia's lawyers deleted..."), tell them how it was handled. Which Quim already did now.

Ok, first, a reminder / disclaimer:

I am a community council member, and I saw the e-mails.

In this particular case, I find the distinction between Nokia doing something and the community doing something quite blurry and difficult to find. The responses I saw from the developers tended to be, "I don't think my packages are illegal, but if you tell me that they must be removed, then go ahead," and most of the actual takedown was done at the request of Nokia employees by people paid by Nokia (although not actually Nokia employees).

Almost all of this happened while I was asleep, during the very early hours of the morning in my time zone, so it wasn't a case of a unanimous council decision or something. There was almost no discussion within the council, and we weren't asked to approve, we were mostly CC'ed.

I'm not saying that it was the wrong thing to do, I'm just saying that this wasn't really a "community" decision in any way.

If the final decision from Nokia is that the emulators and wallpapers cannot be returned to official Nokia distribution channels (Ovi, Maemo Select, etc) then I think we'll need to have a real community decision made about the maemo.org repositories, where, at the minimum, we get a unanimous decision from the elected council members (because I believe we have a fairly wide representation of opinions on the council this term).

This will also become an issue if we don't see some movement in the next week or so from Nokia in regards to this. One of the reasons I haven't protested more is because we were told this is a very temporary situation until things can be clarified.

We're both talking about different decisions here, benny.

I wasn't refering to the decision of whether or not to pull down the emulators for the weekend, but the long-term legal decision of whether or not Maemo official repositories will host these packages. Maybe I missed Quim's post today, but as far as I know, that actual decision has yet to be made. I'll look around in case I missed it though.

Oh. Do we.

OK, this is so completely not what I was talking about... Certainly you couldn't and shouldn't make announcements about things that you don't know of yet.

I referred to this post, guess you read it... at least you thanked him for it.


Oh, and about "the decision": Independence is all nice and such, but when it comes to filthy, disgusting legal issues like so-called "intellectual property" (I hope we're all aware that there's no such thing and the term as such is propaganda), it wouldn't do any bad to listen to the advice of Nokia's lawyers. I assume at least the council members will be getting this advice for free. Other communities would have to pay for it.

I've said it before but I'm going to (very briefly) say it again - we could possibly learn from the setup that the Redhat sponsored Fedora have with legally 'iffy' packages being relegated to the entirely separate RPM Fusion.

Does anyone have any idea how feasible it would be for someone to duplicate the maemo-extras build system to create something that worked the same way without using maemo.org resources?

I don't know much about Fedora... so how is it set up then? Someone outside the community just makes a repository? The same people host it? How exactly does using something along the lines of RPM Fusion relieve us of any legal responsibility (whether you believe emulators are legal or not) of hosting the packages in question?

Just to make sure we're clear here-- in the US the principle of IP is not propaganda but is actually codified in our Constitution.

Now, we can easily debate the silliness wrapped around the core principles, but without an actual amendment the core concept, at least for the US, stands.

I won't speak for other nations.

Fedora is community run, but its main infrastructure is sponsored by Redhat in a similar manner to Nokia sponsoring maemo.org. Various things that could cause legal trouble for Redhat are forbidden from being included in Fedora. This is a community decision - Fedora could decide to include these things, but at the cost of making it difficult for Redhat to continue their support, which would be in no-one's best interests.

RPM Fusion is a volunteer effort that is nothing to do with the Fedora project, and isn't sponsored by Redhat. It is, however, very much a part of the community, and many of the packagers that maintain software in Fedora proper also maintain related packages in RPM Fusion.

It's main strength is that it provides a well know one-stop-shop for 'forbidden' items, and maintains that similar quality standards to the main project; essentially it follows the same rules as Fedora, with the exception of inverting the 'forbidden items' list. It gives users an easily configured source of reliable packages and minimises the creation of multiple independent, mutually incompatible repositories hosting packages of unknown quality.

... which, by itself, wouldn't rule out the possibility that it is a propaganda term. - But AFAIK, the U.S. constitution doesn't even use the term "intellectual property" in its so-called "intellectual-property-clause".

What I meant was this.

(And I recommend reading this.)

I love RMS. Can't help it.

I see what Gnu is saying, but I also think the term "IP" is in and of itself innocuous. I see no harm per se in an umbrella term for copyright, patents and trademarks and feel that some of the ire is much ado about nothing.

Rather than going to war over semantics, they should focus on battling the bastardization of the principles (ie, stupidly long copyrights, et al). What Gnu and others don't seem to get is that "IP" has become a strawman, a foil for arguments that dilutes the real dissension and induces time wasted on things of lesser importance... like terms.



EDIT: that last comment was meant half tongue-in-cheek. It just doesn't come across, sorry. Need a new smiley...