Henri Bergius, Michael Hasselmann and myself just had some beers here in Mountain View (CA, USA). It was a coincidence and we celebrated it.

Of course maemo.org came to the discussion and Henri had a very good point: pages like http://maemo.org/intro/ or http://maemo.org/development/ have been unchanged for years and now they don't reflect anymore the community that exists here.

Updating these pages would require to think what is this website and this community today, and what does it want to become. It sounded like a good task to be driven by a newly elected Council. Six months is a decent period for discussion, planning and implementation considering that we are talking basically about editing plain web pages.

In our discussion we agreed that maemo.org is still strong in the mobile user aspect. It is a community continuously active since 2005, open to discuss, experiment and collaborate on Maemo but also on related mobile topics where "related" can have a flexible definition.

Qt Project and Mer Project sounded like natural neighbors, one appealing more to application developers and the other one more to platform developers. Perhaps a nice neighborhood relationship can be built between these communities and others alike.

There is a lot of experience around: where does this community want to head in the future? How tied or flexible wants this community to be to Maemo as it is described still today in the maemo.org Intro and related pages? Does it make sense to think of "Maemo" as just a name, with a history but also a future? What are you missing out there that maemo.org could provide? What would be the element that today would make this community stick together and evolve further?

Its a very difficult topic with a lot of questionmarks. In my opinion it depends on what Nokia is planing to do with Qt in the future.

The foundations of this community is in my opinion Linux and open source. Before tablets, and nowdays mainly mobiles.

Qt is only important because it is the main development framework for our toys. It replaced GTK over the past years. So if Intel and Samsung is faster than Nokia and the platform is good enought html5 will become more dominant at our site because of the common foundations (linux and open source).

So, to end this post, it depends on Nokia and their confidential Meltemi plans if this community will continue to resist here and add perhaps the one or other Tizen related topic or if this community will slowly diffuse over to a new page hosted by Samsung and Intel within the next years. Without the knowledge how Qt continues there is no need to drop the name maemo. It is perhaps to early for such kind of decision.

Honestly, I would like maemo.org to leave the Nokia focus behind. I mean, we enjoyed some nice Nokia gadgets over the last seven years (well, the old-timers of you, at least ;-)), and I will always remember the great Maemo conferences (even the onces that were officially held under the MeeGo umbrella … I kept meeting mostly Maemo folks regardless).

But there's a whole world out there, and why would we limit ourselves to Nokia? Because I've come to realize that this place is about the community, and not companies.

To repeat what Quim said with my own words: The collected experience here, and the community itself, would provide useful for anything mobile. For example, which cool hackable devices are coming up? What can we do with them (the Bioloid-N900 stuff comes to mind)? Or the simple "How to get more out of my favorite handset/tablet device?", which is already happening in TMO anyway.

Discuss!

IMHO, Maemo used to be an OS, but today for me it describes an idea of open mobile platforms that lives on in projects like MeeGo, Tizen (at least I hope so), Nemo, Plasma Active, Mer, or Meltemi (maybe). Maemo as an OS is dead, but its DNA lives on in these other projects.
The maemo.org community should embrace all this IMHO. Qt happens to be a common demoninator shared by the various heirs of Maemo.

I see this place for people who are interested in open mobile hardware and software. There are other things that people are interested in and discuss about but I see those as the most common things among people here whether they are developers or users. Actually this really hasn't changed over the years - The place just doesn't only revolve around Nokia anymore.

Thoughts on this, only to get it out of the way and go back to the core topics of this thread:

- Qt & HTML5 are not exclusive. Qt includes Qt WebKit, which is one of the main HTML5 app development enablers out there.

- But more importantly, HTML5 is progressing fast in app development and mobile platforms regardless of how fast company A, B, C are being.

- But even more importantly, nobody is proposing to restrict maemo.org to Qt, GTK+, HTML5 or any other toolkit or language.

Personally I wish there would be more HTML5 related discussion and work. It's not a coincidence that I'm helping out the PhoneGap for Qt 5 project (and for Qt 4 as in N9 and Symbian too).

If anybody is interested in the HTML5 topic please point to an own thread.

Going back to this discussion, a critical point needing agreement seems to be the role you want Nokia and Nokia products to play in the future of maemo.org. More opinions on this?

For instance: Vivaldi tablet. http://makeplaylive.com/

No idea about their plans to build a user community but to pick it as an example: would they have a place here? Would it be worth to actively invite them around?

More examples are welcome. They are useful no to get too abstract in the discussion.

In my opinion Nokia products are the catalyst for this group of people coming together. They give the Maemo community set of 'baseline' platforms which are common reference points which we all understand. These products are readily available (even if you have to import them to US/UK!!)

I find it harder to empathise with someone using a platform / OS that I've never used because there is no reference platform (e.g. ExoPC / Mer / Nemo) (but these are important activities.)

I think visibility of Nokia's vision of the future would implicitly encourage the community to plan for the future.

I joined late, but I'm amazed by the proactive, altruistic, nature of people here. It would be a shame if it fragmented unnecessarily.

Myself, I find HTML anything a poor thing to do application programming beyond very simple applications. HTML is not a programming language but a presentation language, and the JavaScript APIs are not mature enough to create cross-platform solutions.

Incidentally, there's rumors that Meltemi will only allow QML + JavaScript applications (and by proxy of course "HTML5 applications). Were it so, it'd be no better than the old JavaME applications in possibilities.

I'd very much like Nokia to have a big role with products regarding Maemo, Linux, Qt, open source etc. but there's not much we as a community can do about that I'd think. I'll see what Meltemi brings, but I'm very doubtful that it'll be exciting for my specific self like N9 was.

To be honest, You tell us? It;s obvious, that it's dependent on Nokia's decision - Community was and is open for any constructive collaboration.

For now, it seems "stable" that Nokia finances maemo.org infrastructure + basic tech support + sometimes unexpected godless like device seeding for Coding Competition and Community Awards (huge thanks again, as it was really unexpected). Yet, platform/device side, it seems to be totally stall.

If, by any chance - which seems quite impossible now - Nokia will miraculously decide to release device based on Mer, it will be welcomed here with open hands. Same goes for Maemo 5 (yes, purely Fremantle on new hardware) device, which is even more less likely to happen, anyway All more closed variants based on Meego/Tizen frankensteins (waves to Harmattan users) would probably result in mixed feelings, but I think that would find it's place here anyway.

Same goes for opposite scenario - lack of funding from Nokia side would focus Community to go totally independently (or die.).
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Conclusion, at least for me, is that "how much Nokia in maemo.org" depends on how much Nokia is willing to participate No one will show middle finger to open hand from Nokia's logo, but in case of such hand being lacking, our one is going to put fingers into "stick guy" and walk away.

/Estel