Originally Posted by Texrat

Abill_UK's hostile, trolling post was deleted. That sort of thing has gone far beyond an acceptable point.

Maemo.org encourages constructive dialog of all kinds-- emphasis on constructive. And yes that includes harsh criticism. But not when it gets personal. Not when it's repeated ad infinitum.

Let's be civil, or take it to a site that thrives on childish behavior.

Originally Posted by specc

IMO the one true hero of open source somehow connected with Nokia, is stskeeps.

Myself, I'm more pragmatic. The true test is whatever works. Open source or closed source? Who cares. The Lumia 800 has a way better browser than the N9. Android is way more open source than Harmattan.

Originally Posted by stskeeps

things have improved immensely since back when i started on n800. A lot of harmattan ux is actually open sourced, much more than what was ever in fremantle. Almost scaringily too much, some would say.

Originally Posted by abill_uk

Talk of the devil ! and yes i agree with you because Nokia obviously thought this community was not capable of knocking up a better OS than them.

Originally Posted by Stskeeps

Frankly speaking though, while it seems like Quim is the bad guy when talking about things that can't be done or open sourced, you'd be surprised how much he has orchestrated in order to do good things for open source in Nokia. The trouble is that sometimes the best things you've done is things you can't talk about in public, but just smile when you see people being happy about them.

I personally wouldn't have been doing the things I'm doing now and have been doing, without Quim's help and very early on discussions about the crazy ideas some of us people had in the community - like to brave to have a open platform for mobile devices.

This is from a platform developer POV: Things have improved immensely since back when I started on N800. A lot of Harmattan UX is actually open sourced, much more than what was ever in Fremantle. Almost scaringily too much, some would say.

Though some might argue that the applications aren't.. 1) who would want to continue on MTF-based applications 2) can't anyone with half a brain re-do these in QML in significantly shorter time than Nokia took to do them in MTF?

Originally Posted by Stskeeps

Well, part of the issue there might have been that when someone in community gets good enough at something, well, they got hired by Nokia or other companies in the open source ecosystem

But frankly: the way maemo.org is organised and is run is not very project-oriented and lends to way too much bikeshedding. Even in old Mer we chose a completely different working method than the rest of the community.

While the open source community does seem like the greatest thing ever which can accomplish everything under the sun, it all bends down to three things: time, money and focus.

Personally, these days I think the best product communities are the ones that operate like a proper open source project, but also has people from companies contributing within it. Mer has that, now, too. I've been involved with companies which function as open source communities internally as well - it's sometimes about the working method.

Even in big and known open source projects, go look closer at the actual contributors and you'll find many small to medium businesses, or even big corporations. .. and often that these contributions from small companies turn out to be paid work by the bigger ones.

If you believe you can do better than Nokia, have the community start one or more companies, work together in a proper open source way on common items, gain investments, etc. You can't easily put out actual mobile products on the market without actual $$$.