Forum Nokia explained yesterday at the Maemo Barcelona Long Weekend that Maemo commercial developers interested in publishing at the Ovi Store are invited to apply to their Launchpad program for free.

Approved applicants will have free access to Ovi Publisher plus the regular services from the Launchpad program.

More details specific to Maemo will be provided next week but developers were encouraged to apply already at http://www.forum.nokia.com/Premium_S...aunchpad.xhtml explaining the Maemo projects they are working on.

It is now officially announced at http://forum.nokia.com/maemo

Good looking out Quim, thank you.

Thanks for the news! Very sharp.

Offtopic:
Have you seen the comments on Nokia Lauchpad release?? Comments are ranging from 'How do I connect with XML to DB' to 'My Nokia 5800 mic. doesn't work!!11!!ONEONE'.
Poor Ron Liechty who has to manage the Forum...

Unless I'm mistaken, it seems that Launchpad is incompatible with open source development because everything there is under NDA.

Assume you are developing an open source application, which you also hope to sell on Ovi in closed source form. (Yes, there are people who will buy such software, just as there are people who buy CDs even though they could download the same music for free.)

Suppose Launchpad publishes some Maemo 6 API changes under NDA. You can't then use the new API in your application, if others will see that API being called when they view your git or svn repository.

How is this supposed to work?

Regards,
Roger

Quoting Quim, "Forum Nokia explained yesterday at the Maemo Barcelona Long Weekend that Maemo commercial developers interested in publishing at the Ovi Store are invited to apply to their Launchpad program for free."

If there is any activity under NDA it will do more with timing (having access to certaqin information before t's public) than with content (being able to use APIs that won't be ever public). Just like it happened with the Fremantle Stars, actually.

Anyway, we are doing our best pushing public unstable releases with APIs and docs as soon as they are ready.

Thanks stskeeps, but commercial development and open source software are not mutually exclusive (MySQL, for example).

But Quim has answered my question. If you join Launchpad you might get told about an API change under NDA, before that API change is made public. If you make use of that API, you can't commit your changes to your project's public version control repository until the API change goes public.

I would simply avoid using the new API until it goes public.

Regards,
Roger

Just wondering... Is the program still active ? I know of companies who still have not received any response to their applications (not even an acknowledgement or plain rejection) so am a bit of a loss whether to recommend/mention this program to people or not ?