Here is a good article in Linux Weekly News about a presentation by Josh Berkus. How many of these points apply to Nokia? I'm afraid way too many.

http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/370157/2a06baf10df8e58a/

Some gems:
1) "It's also important to set up an official web site which is down as often as it's up. It's not enough to have no web site at all; in such situations, the community has an irritating habit of creating sites of its own. But a flaky site can forestall the creation of those sites, ensuring that information is hard to find. "

3) "There should be no useful information about the code, build methods, the patch submission process, the release process, or anything else. Then, when people ask for help, tell them to RTFM."

4) "Project decisions should be made in closed-door meetings."

5) "Employ large amounts of legalese."

7) "Keep the decision-making powers unclear"

8) "Screw around with licensing. Community members tend to care a lot about licenses, so changing the licensing can be a good way to make them go elsewhere. Even better is to talk a lot about license changes without actually changing anything;"

10) "Silence. Don't answer queries, don't say anything. A company which masters this technique may not need any of the others; it is the most effective community destroyer of them all. "


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I mailed this to the maemo-devel mailing list earlier, but it's actually a wider community issue than a just a narrow developer issue and more non-programmers will see it here, fyi. That thread is here:
http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...ry/023786.html

Thanks for the link and post. Great read.

I would say that maybe half of that might be true.

And the site thing is imho a low blow. Any migration from server A to server B tends to NOT go cleanly 100% of the time :)

Overall I see Nokia oscilating between a lot of the points. They want to be open yet closed at the same time.

this has also been discussed in maemo-community mailing list but doesn't appear at http://maemo.org/community/maemo-community/ for some reason.

Interesting! My personal take:

1 is to make the project depend as much as possible on difficult tools
Improving

2: Encourage the presence of poisonous people and maximize the damage that they can create.
<sense of humour>Now this makes me wonder whether I should be putting my time in this reply... <politically correct smiley> </politically correct smiley></sense of humour>

3: Provide no documentation.
Actually our problem is to organize well all the documentation available. Improving.


4: Project decisions should be made in closed-door meetings.
True in many cases. Half of them come from the fact of having to run a profitable business in a very competitive sector. The other half comes from an inertia, consequence of the same business reason. Improving.

5: Employ large amounts of legalese.
Nokia has legalese for the Nokia actions and products. For the Maemo community we have very light http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_contribution_guidelines and little else. We have used NDAs with community members only to give them access to secret hardware, as per suggestion of the own community.


6: The community liaison must be chosen carefully.
It has been chosen carefully, indeed. Jokes apart, we have a rich community liasion including several Nokia members specialized in their areas (some of them appointed, some of them at their own risk) and, in the other end, an elected Council and a professional maemo.org development team.


7: Governance obfuscation.
You might or might not agree on the part governed by Nokia, but it's clearly formulated. The community governance is decently clear and documented imho.

8: Screw around with licensing.
For the feedback received it looks like the LGPL based licensing makes happy a majority of community & commercial developers. Now even Qt is LGPL. Note that a % of legalese Nokia has is precisely to make sure that we act properly with licenses.

9: Do not allow anybody outside the company to have commit access, ever.
Basically true for the components copyrighted by Nokia, even if there is a grey area with e.g. Hildon or Modest. On the other hand Maemo is made of hundreds of components where no Nokia developer has commits rights. I believe we have to solve other problems before this one e.g. increasing the code contributions in the first place.

10: Silence.
Actually I and other Nokians would get a lot more work done if we wouldn't be active here so often.

Let me add one point, since this is about companies nurturing communities:

11: Fail in your core business
Then no matter how good you are in 1-10 your community project will fail.

Cos, for some reason, Jebba raised it on maemo-developers:

http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...ry/023786.html

Why discuss the same topic in different places? Now people have to reply and catch up on both, repeating themselves. Would be great to actually mirror mailing lists here at TMO, possibly even be able to reply from TMO.

Two different audiences. I don't think many in maemo-devel ever come to talk (developers generally have a preference for email lists over forums). And most users (e.g. most of the community) finds using forums easier. You'll note at -devel there's a number of @nokia responses--that would not have occurred here. But the main reason is that I just posted it there first out of my own natural inclinations, then reflected that it would be a good thread here.

I use the n800 since > 2 years now and recently obtained a n900. I'm not a full time software developer but use linux since at least 1996.
From my point of view the maemo community and the interaction with nokia is not as bad as described int he article, at least documentation and information about architecture and code are available, as mentioned before finding them is the hard part.
Like e.g. the introduction to opengles porting, I would have expected to find something here: http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/...eveloper_Guide
However, I found it later by accident under http://wiki.maemo.org/OpenGL-ES by using google (the maemo.org search seems to be completely broken atm). That is inconvenient, however I have not yet met many wikis that are organised any better.
The downtime of maemo.org is also not worse than what i've seen from other community pages, in the last 2 years I can only remember two times where I was unable to connect it, that the server move on the weekend caused an outtime can hardly be described as "more down than available". However the speed of maemo.org was often unacceptable, I hope that got solved by the move now.
Decision making unclear and in closed doors might have a point, however I personally was not disturbed by that. But I also know that i was sent mails that invited me to participate in votes for decisions on such topics...
Licensing and legalese - i have not encountered these for NXX0 devices up to now. I can build my applications in the SDK and install them without having to sign anything or to hack my device, I can simply do that. I'm not sure if I miss understand something here but I did not yet encounter anything like that in my two years of NXX0 usage.
A valid point is the 'silence' thing. nokia could be more vocal, but to be honest - imho thats true for most companies I know

All in all I can't see how the maemo community is treated any worse by nokia than most other communities associated with a company that is not a complete open source company.

Great article, and I have seen many of these problems in this community over the years.

However, I really believe that Nokia has been addressing most of these points to the best of their ability.

The best thing they have done so far in terms of community enhancement is hire Quim. He's an excellent community advocate, both to the community and to Nokia.

The LWN article is worth reading, but I believe Nokia and Maemo are just about the worst examples to measure it by.

If you want the perfect illustration of how to kill a community, look at Sharp and the Zaurus some years ago.

Of course, most potential contenders don't even qualify, because they don't even create one in the first place.

So let's not dishearten those few that are actually making the effort...