Sigh... This is nothing to do with MidGard being FOSS! It really doesn't. MidGard is, in fact, a sell-able product via LGPL. Bergie specifically put MidGard under LGPL so he could SELL CM sites to companies, where they would be the legal owner of the resultant site, including any customization they needed. This was the entire business of Nemein, creating CM sites based on MidGard, and selling those sites (and occasionally ongoing service) to companies.

Nokia doesn't know MidGard from vBulletin. They purchased a site, with maintainance, from a vendor, and had them add custom things to it over time. That includes the licence/IMEI validator, and other things they may not want to have been public, and later things this strange little "community" was asking them for occasionally. By time they were facing shutting it down, they weren't quite sure what was on there, but they knew they "owned" it, and could shut it off at will.

The idea of making everything FOSS was a no-go from the start. We did ask. Nobody wants to sign a document saying "all the stuff in this box is free" without knowing how to look through the box or evaluate what any of it is.

The "safer" alternative was to sign over the rights to a group that would be legally responsible for it. That limits their legal liability to some degree. But there were a few items where that wasn't the case. In particular they knew (from the EULA) there were 3rd party blobs in the device images where they had specific contractual obligations. So those were explicitly called out and denied in the transference documents. Again, we fought to include them, but there was no budging.

So tell me: Which would you rather have? A legal entity that holds the rights to oversee the parts we have left, or the site shut down almost 2 years ago? Those really were the only choices.