Just logging in to state this - before any of you are attending the 10 april meeting, please read through the minutes and logs above and understand that for any given community-hosted service/app store there is a range of problems.

We'll try to set up a meeting on the 10th, it wasn't directly decided as noted in the e-mail but we'll probably have a sync to move things forward. Mer-general archive and information is at http://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Mailing_lists

Some problems:

1) Cost of hardware and handling donations, including checks and balances, setup of legal entities
2) Legal implications (who gets the nastygrams) if we distribute patented or otherwise copyrighted material we aren't permitted to distribute because of a user uploading it.
3) Who contributes and maintains support for the various build targets (Mer, MeeGo, Harmattan, Fremantle) within the OBS.

For 2), from Mer point of view, we're a proper open source project (soon with some non-profit established) with no legal department or corporate hosts that can easily fight back when we get attacked because of random-user's upload of some pirated ROM in a N900 NES emulator to a community OBS.

That is also noted in the minutes that we're working to find a way to do this without risking Mer's core mission and Mer's ability for others to build upon it without worrying it'll go away due to a legal threat.

The other side of the coin is that such shared services are needed to properly grow communities, because in this world, it's not enough to just put up a repository, you need to provide security updates, make it easy to find the software, not just your typical output of a SDK.