I think Nokia is scratching their heads wondering why the blow back as of late (Knowing Nokia, they hadn't anticipated it). It isn't that we want support for the N900 to remain indefinitely but rather for it to remain relevant if all that is different is an OS, this is a Mobile computer right, well it should just be an OS update no need to have enforced specs. Also the biggest issue is the Nokia culture which shows that products get abruptly dropped ... it's like Nokia brought the Feature phone philosophy over to the Smartphone segment, and this has led to projects that don't get completed or bug fixes arriving late, or information flowing out at a snails pace.

I fully understand what Texrat means by find your indentity, because Nokia is sure having an identity crisis. Evidence being the Symbian, Harmattan, MeeGo, Maemo fiasco that ensues as I type this. Being tight lipped on Flash 10.1 (I'm pissed because I can't stream the damn Worldcup), and so many other issues that are an indictment of Nokia's lost indentity. Are you open or are you closed? Inquiring minds need to know.

Ok, but we can't control how a company that we have no equitable interest in operates... besides that wasn't the meat of my post only the opportunity to enter the thread.

The question remains:
What needs to be done in order for Maemo to be 100% community supported and how can we help to make it so?

BTW, I do visit MeeGo.com and have since day 1. If I do not have something constructive to say or have a question to ask, I general don't post.

Opinions about how we got here aside My understanding is that Maemo the OS will not have a place on the MeeGo forum by design. Maemo will still have a community will it not?

What next?

The main problem, for me, is that I can only seem to run after Nokia and its chosen path with little knowledge and so many drastic changes.

I have only been porting an application to Maemo. And I didn't have time to add any new feature to it as all the time I spent on it was on the different UIs I had to deal with.
Not to mention that the last adaptation is far for complete and, due to little time on my side (ok), I fear I won't even be able to finish it.
I'd like to trust MeeGo as I trusted Maemo and I'd like to learn Qt and C++, but I don't want to leave the Fremantle version as it is.

Of course I can't expect Nokia to change and go back and let me have my time to finish this project for Fremantle, but it would helped A LOT knowing a little more in advance what was about to happen.

The transition is drastic, I understand that. I undestand (more: I hope) it was suffered internally, that someone thought about us and said "it won't be easy for them" and I understand it was to be made.
But again, communication totally lacked.

Now it's not only Nokia that I have to worry about, it's now many more like-minded companies.
This scares me.

I want to port again my app to MeeGo and have it run on as many MeeGo UXs as possible, but it's very confused so far how this will work and this scares me even more.
(this may be due, and probably is, to my lack of knowledge of Qt and how MeeGo will support different UXs, but still.. it's very scary).

I will surely jump again on this wagon, but it's running fast and I feel I'm left behind already and it's not even started!

I am not a good writer, I only want to let you, Quim of MeeGo, that I am scared, I feel very little in the MeeGo world, whereas I felt being a bigger entity in Maemo.
I want to believe Nokia has learned, and as many say here, it didn't show this. It learned many things for sure, and you're listing them.
You're playing good with the community, but perhaps you didn't notice there are two communities here ?

The open source community (and you helped that a lot, a lot more than what Android or Apple ever did) and the Maemo Community. The latter feels confused ( I surely am ) and scared a little, and Texrat, GA, qwerty12 and others explained better than me why.

Thanks for understanding.
The point is (sadly) I'm not being ironic nor sarcastic. I'm pretty damn serious, just stating the facts.
The King is really naked.

[QUOTE=gerbick;715994]
This community does more than support you. It could be how you people stay in touch with reality.
/QUOTE]

Agree with you 200%....community is the real interface for all my maemo 5 needs apps,fixes,problems and solutions. Have only recommended the n900 to my friends based on the value the community adds.

The other thing is "3 moves in 3 years"...So even if I invest in a meego device later....I cant be certain that Nokia will persist with meego.

hmm...unfortunately the assurances that meego will gain traction,continous development, new releases every 6 months,will attract more vendors fail to convince me atleast for now.

Believe if N900 supposed to be "the best choice I can get in a shop nowadays" was dumped within 8 months for a new OS which ironically will not be released for the 'best choice' than why should I be bothered abt a device/OS yet to be seen.

Hi,

Funny I missed this thread, even though I'd seen TexRat's blog post...

...yet...

The story for me is (and has been for a while) that there isn't a clear story for developers on the platform. This can be traced back to the Trolltech purchase at the start of 2008 - which was around the point where people started wondering about Qt's role in Maemo.

Let's track the timeline from January 2008 (pre-Diablo) through to today:

1. Jan 2008: Nokia buys Trolltech - no news on plans for Qt in Maemo, but people say "Nothing is changing"
2. Apr 2008: Nokia announces that Qt will be supported for Maemo in addition to GTK+/Hildon
3. September 2008: At the Maemo Summit, Nokia gives some more information on Qt plans in Maemo: Qt will be available but unsupported for Diablo and Fremantle, supported on Harmattan, and then after that "we don't know yet" (but it is obvious that Qt will become primary platform on Harmattan+1)
4. July 2009: During Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, it's announced that Harmattan will be Qt based, and GTK+/Hildon will be "community supported"
5. Sept 09: Fremantle final released with the N900, GTK+/Clutter interface and new UX guidelines, means most Maemo 4 applications need porting to Fremantle
6. Jan 10: MeeGo announced - MeeGo 1.0 will be a merger of Maemo 6 and moblin 2.1, with Qt as the primary UI development framework, connman/oFono/bluez as core telephony & connectivity stack - a common OS base for multiple user experiences
7. Apr/May 10: MeeGo Netbook 1.0 released, core applications include Banshee, Evolution, core UI is GTK+/Clutter based. Harmattan will be Qt based, but will use Debian package management, but will still be called MeeGo Handset 1.0.

Now, as an application developer, in July 2009, just as Fremantle is ramping up to get out the door and wow people on a Maemo phone, you've been told that your existing application will require porting, and that the platform you're porting to will be obsoleted by the following version. Qt 4.5 had some hacks to get it working on Maemo with qt4-hildon, but Qt 4.6 is the first fully supported version of standard Qt for Maemo, and it only came out last month on Maemo 5 with PR 1.2.

So what do you do between July 2009 and May 2010? Do you migrate your application to Fremantle? Try to re-develop it in Qt (or write a new app in Qt)? If so, Qt4-Hildon or standard Qt? None of these are trivial decisions - and importantly none of them are making your application better (which, as an application developer, is what you want to be doing).

And what is this inconsistency between the public messaging of January when MeeGo was going to be the all-singing, all-dancing stack you could build anything on, and now we see that there is some sort of common bits, covered by this hodge-podge of graphical parts which are using all sorts of toolkits & technologies, probably present because of existing partnership agreements (eg. Evolution Extress & Banshee), shoe-horned together and called MeeGo?

What of the compromises and technology choices that are going on right now unseen in the MeeGo project? The move away from NetworkManager to ConnMan for Novell's MeeGo, imposed by Intel. The requirement to move away from the (very cool) Clutter windowing system to some new & untested Qt replacement for it. The move to oFono for Nokia, leaving their tried & tested communications framework in the bin. It seems like key players are fighting to have their little bit of the world present in the required platform, resulting in a cluster**** which will not resemble any other Linux distribution, and which will once again not provide a compelling developer experience.

Yes, I am getting fatigued by the evolution of the project, and I have yet to see any real hooks to allow people to get involved in MeeGo - on the contrary, I have seen a good amount of stop energy in the form of "it's too early for that" and "that's all legacy stuff irrelevant to the platform" which is killing any good will left.

I may be wrong - maybe when MeeGo handset comes out it will be gorgeous and compelling and we will all be dreaming of millions of MeeGo phones, and application developers will come flooding in. I'd love to see Hildon ported to MeeGo and let all those Maemo application developers have their apps work well unchanged. I don't really think either is going to happen. It feels like we're back in 2006 again, starting afresh, and there has been a deliberate strategy to have Maemo be "the one we threw away", to use the phrase from the Mythical Man-Month.

Dave.

That question is just too good to let pass.

I don't look at MeeGo as the enemy - but I kind of look at MeeGo as the child that killed it's too young mother before she reached her maturity and full potential.

Well, Maemo is not dead, but it's in a wheelchair and relies on MeeGo to push her around for the rest of her life.

I believe for Nokia, MeeGo makes sense.

I also believe that owners of a Maemo phone would have more Maemo specific software and updates to existing software in the repositories right now, right this minute, if it wasn't for the rise of Qt as the new star that developers are being told they(/we) want to go towards, but have no cleared path to yet.

Furthermore, I believe that the Qt version on official Maemo and the Qt version on official MeeGo will be the same Qt version only for so long. When that ends, all of the N900/MeeGo/Qt ecosystem will become the /MeeGo/Qt ecosystem. At which point what's left of the platform would be jumping over on unofficial MeeGo @ N900.

Compared to a world with Maemo 6 in it, I believe the N900 late in the product cycle will be more reliant on community hacks - like the Mer failure but also the Easy Debian success - than if "step 5 of 5" had been in the same general direction as step 4.

So basically, I still feel that I get less for my money - right NOW and also in later phases when Qt evolves - in the N900 because of MeeGo. This makes it hard for me to be enthusiastic about MeeGo, and honestly, Maemo is the only current link between me and the Nokia product portfolio.

Some like the daughter, some like the mother. I wish now I'd started off with another analogy.

By the time Meego gets started in 2011 the Pinetrail and Moorestown x86 computing will probably be realized in mobile phones.

I'm at a loss as to where that came from. Something I said?

100% open-source would be a good start. A device DESIGNED around open-source (instead of forcing a square peg in a round hole) would go leaps and bounds toward that.