Personally, I do not believe that getting 100% "open" state of Maemo is possible via any "transfer" of IP from Nokia, even if they would like to. Simply put, they're not owners of many parts, so no ammount of begging/business prroposals is going to make it happen.

^This doubt include ideas of buying IP from Nokia in case it went bankrupt - I hardly can imagine this being possible, and even if, the price would be insane for FOSS community. Not to mention, that even *if* we would miraculously have millions of $$$ available, I would prefer to use it for re-writing replacements/designing own device from scratch, instead of paying for opening "decades" old code
---

So, overall, such ideas seems a little abstract to me.

Also, even if we put aside current positive boost in cooperation with Nokia, I'm perfectly sure that - in case of "doomsday" or separation scenario - all Council/Community can do for current code is to keep it available, both psychically and legally (OBS repos etc), then, we would be in position where we *must* go our own way into future. Not much to be scavenged from currently closed bits, anyway.

Disclaimer - I do not believe in any doomsday soon. Yet, I think part of Council's responsibility is to have failsafe/plan B realistic plans at hand.

/Estel

//Edit
SD69, could You finally accept nomination? Pleeease?

Yeah.. and that didn't turn out so well--not for lack of community effort, though. What DID manage to work was severely crippled by the lack of fully functioning drivers and a lack of documentation to make all-new drivers from scratch that worked reliably. I remember it clearly. I was there and I tried it and followed it closely with much anticipation and hope, yes. It's not much different today though, no. I find it ironic and a little funny that you chose to hold that up as an example--it only proves szopin's point and weakens yours. Strange argument.

If that is true--which I always feared might be the case, then it makes Maemo that much more of a scam for Nokia's choice of less and less open hardware to base it on. It still doesn't answer questions regarding closed-sourced, completely SOFTWARE portions like the calendar, media player and other tools that support the operating system but cripple it if you try to separate it from the OS.

But, I think we already got our answer a few pages back: Too bad.

What the heck is 'psychically'? It SOUNDS like 'psychic'...mind reading? But I can't tell if you meant physically or psychologically or something else. :P

yeah, intentionally chosen example. The thing is that I don't believe we'll see those blobs open sourced, ever. thus I think focusing one's energy into that battle is a waste of time. Not saying that it isn't worth asking every now and then but to put that much energy in it... You've been here a long time and seen how many times and for how long different people have tried to get those blobs opened. What I'm saying is IMHO it would make more sense to concentrate more on present day issues that we can solve.

As a side note: from a n900 users pow meego was a good thing for at least one reason. the n900 was a reference device so some binary things were relicensed in order to get meego running on it. So without meego it would be even harder to boot alternative stuff with it back then Nokia had a business reason to relicense those which is not really the case now, is it?

No idea of legal status of this proposal but whatevs:
I'd vote for candidate that is willing to try different approach/strategy in Nokia talks to get the source. Whether monetary/diplomatic... hell if we can gather 100k with kickstart campaign once all Nokia-community talks bring nothing new, use that money to hire reverse engineering guys and do the work ourselves. If in US it is illegal we surely can find a country that allows it and hire people there (or pay for transport/housing to the greatest minds from here if they are willing and have time for it)

I don't think those ideas are bad but I think they are in the wrong direction. Qgil stated clearly that any more code will not be opened. And maybe there is no need to. After the time it will take either to raise the funds and close a deal with Nokia (assuming that is ever possible) or to reverse engineer the drivers for the N900, most of the N900's will be dead and the device itself will be pretty much obsolete. So we might just as well code new drivers for a device of our choice. What's the most open device out there? How much blobs can we scavenge from the android kernel to work unmodified?

Other than drivers do we really need anything else opensourced to go along? Of course the more code is open the better, but the most valuable of programs are open or we have nice open alternatives, the drivers are at least redistributable so the things that remain closed are device specific like mce etc. They won't do us any good in the long term anyway...

We do have a mail client, application manager, browser, telepathy, phone client (from meego), camera app, text editor, office suite, file manager media player.
We are missing a calendar (maybe free, alternatives exist, it's just a calendar after all) messaging application, gallery and all those IIRC exist on meego, so it's a matter of porting.

So much for the user applications.

Now for the core, we lack drivers, mce, battery management and more. But I don't know how much effort we should put in those as they may be have to be developed again if we ever move to a new device (in some time it has to happen)

Fair enough, still have a feeling opensourcing would give us best benefits. Once you have all the apps/parts you mentioned open, CSSU would not be new killer-feature like portrait, but update to the latest kernel with all core components in up-to-date state. All libs out there in 2012+ state. We could then throw maemo on any device out there (assuming driver availability of course) and we'd move this forum from being N9(x0) specific to OS specific - open sourced operating system that was the idea they sold us some point in the past.

I actually saw a real GTA-04 today. It actually looks quite nice and is based on a similar SOC as to the N900. It even has an FM transmitter, resistive screen and tvout through the headpohone jack. Unlike the N900 hundred it also has a magnetometer, USB OTG out of the box and 512 MB RAM. And basically everything is open (the 3D graphics driver isn't, but it can be used without it if needed). It has no keyboard & is a bit expensive though.

BTW - banner where ?

512GB ram is a bit overkill, no?

Sure, will end up as Gates with 640kb... then again why not, I like Porsche