Nokia has few applications under open source licence such as Modest and application manager. Now, as case with Modest by the time of creation of this text, there are a few critical bugs/issues which affect a large amount of people. The fix is available in the source code but updated version of the package is not released until Nokia releases a full update. The lead time could be couple of months and the release times are never annouced beforehand.

Due to the delay, many active people notice the same bugs and go to bugzilla. Sometimes they do notice the existing report and write their own - this causes many duplicated bug reports to appear. A lot of effort is wasted thereby with the delayed bugfix release and redundant work. Delays and redundant work creates frustration. Additionally, the software may be unusable for many months when it could be fixed now. Talented individual frustrated enough might roll up their own update, but if 10 people do it for themselves this is clearly again a lot more wasted effort and time.

Delay is therefore bad for user experience and can make the whole device look bad in the eye of frustrated people. This is definitely a lost position for marketing efforts when fast bugfix releases would be a positive element for consumer mind.

Originally Posted by ARJWright

One side that's probably not considered often here is that even though Nokia is using open source software the business processes might not be as open and so hence the delay.

Originally Posted by ARJWright

Concerning updates on included software, the questions that have to be asked include:
- does the update address something that has no dependency on locale/carrier included parameters with an object?
If it has a dependency, how can Nokia communicate their process effectively without damaging stakeholder relationships?
- Maemo as a commnuity needs to help enable Nokia to be able ot answer this question.

Originally Posted by VRe

Why there is such a monolithic release system in place? Release when everything is tested, all has to be ready or nothing is given?

Nokia has done updates for phones and older tablets the same way. When you think how a phone was flashed to newest firmware in a backroom of a store, it is easy to understand the value of complete monolithic update package. You're not going to the shop every day or week. Now the usecase is different as we use OTA updates - there is no backroom and therefore monolithic update release is the way of the past days. Full images can still be made for those store rooms if necessary..

As community we should encourage Nokia to do something which would make them really shine!

See: http://maemo.org/community/brainstor..._packages-002/

Originally Posted by evad

As an additional note to this discussion/brainstorm is that it'd be actually very helpful for everyone if Nokia would "officially" communicate to Maemo Community Council (hence to all of us) what is on their current development plate, [...]

Originally Posted by Jaffa

I won't comment on whether or not I think that's feasible, but I was going to say that posting such a request in an existing thread is probably not the best way to do it (except Texrat has Thanksed a couple of posts here already).

I'd suggest, in future, an email to council@maemo.org, pointing to appropriate threads and posts here.