No fingers pointed, just trying to share information and collaboration during a testing period. Remember that nobody has paid a cent for an N900 and anybody playing with one is conscious of his status of tester.

Hardware selections are made well in advance based on what is available, price, time of delivery, reliability. It's a complex business really far away from what most of us know and do.

So we have OMAP3430. And we are proposing a solution. The critique is that we could have shared the problem with the community before. Well, agreed. But we shared and discussed (read the maemo-developers archives) and what we have is what we have agreed to be the best solution available.

Now, when the first real N900 users pay for their device and go back home they will find:

- Easy access to software downloadable from Nokia repositores. Optification is enforced to all the software hosted there.

- maemo.org Extras pre-configured but not enabled by default. Users need to check the box if the repo hasn't been installed by other means.

- maemo.nokia.com/maemo-select updated including a selection of Extras applications that have gone through optify check and other quality criteria tested by Nokia.

And then there is the Internet, with maemo.org as a gateway thanks to the recommended links in the Maemo Nokia sites and the well earned Google juice.

If the user stays within the Nokia + maemo.org Extras selection they won't find this problem easily.

If they go deeper in Extras pure then it shouldn't be any problem either, if the community QA works and optification is pushed in the right way.

If all the links they find about extras-testing come with the corresponding warnings and explanations, the problems should be minimal as well, specially if developers know the optify lesson well and send their packages optimized already from extras-devel.

If links to extras-devel are to be seen only in developer / hardcore contexts and not just in any Talk forum answering newbies... and if the references to extras-devel come always with the right warnings and explanations, then there should be not much problems for pure end users either.

Hopefully this system will be sustainable and work. Freedom comes together with responsibility. Nokia alone won't make it and we are encouraging (and not blaming) community developers and community testers to help in this common goal.

(wow, this was long typing from the N900)