Everything, specially technology, is improvable.

Tech obsolescence is 90% a psychological issue. If it does what is supposed to do, then it doesn't matter if it was made in 1981 or in 2089.

Being in the bleeding edge means that the tech you use will have rough edges. Be glad that Nokia is at least open about them.

I'm worse than that. I want the n900 to become so great and renowned that I can be a smug git about it.

I don't see how you could work for free for _Nokia_.

They work for us, for some money, making a great hardware and some great software that attract FLOSS developers because they are mostly "open", and follow standards such as posix and some GNU/Linux culture...

As I understand, if you develop for maemo you are working for free for us maemo users! Or paid, maybe, depends on your case...

If you develop for GNU/Linux on the desktop, do you consider you are working for free for Intel, AMD, or maybe Nvidia, ati, dell, hp?... If you make FLOSS that runs on windows, are you working for free for Microsoft?

And if you sell a $3 app for the iPhone, do you consider you are working for free for Apple, or that you are "even"?

Regarding the platform continuing or not... All I can advise is sticking with open standards and tools as much as you can, and release your code if possible. That is the recipe for becoming platform independent, and so your "free work for Nokia" can become free work for many other companies and people, now and in the future. You never waste free software!

The only problem with your post is that it unfortunately can be read as a continuation of what many people feel when reading these forums - that they cater to developers first and if you are not a developer you are not just as valuable to the community.

Testing; feedback, bug-reports etc are also essential pieces in driving a platform/application further. You may very well have meant to include such efforts as well but it could also be seen as 'what did you help code?' and I think it's important to re-enforce that 'developing' a platform goes beyond coding efforts.

Well, few more facts. 1999. We have NCDS instead of PC Suite. FBUS cables for phones are sold with software (yes, it wasn't available for free !). There is group of people, who started to provide alternative software for the Linux. Software was forked few times. Starting from some moment it can't provide some parts of support, because Nokia doesn't want to help. People worked for free and there wasn't nothing wrong in it. Really ! It was so big fun. A lot of community and so on.

2008 (or 2009). Really free phones (OpenMoko) are dying.

2009. We have a lot of noise about N900. There are some devices given for free people. There are some discounts proposed after controversial karma selection (yes, who is better - people with some experiences or people, who made buzz, correctly linked their profiles are received enough karma ?) - some of these people were thinking loud thinking on this forum, if they will use their coupon or not... Nokia has got a lot of money, but they can't prepare real SDK (with BT for example), they can't make MMS functionality, etc. etc. Main maemo.org is still not 100% logical (many people are lost) and secure (why do you write password in http ?). Nokia is more "open source friendly" and is giving some job places according to some people.

Excuse me, but I don't buy it. In my opinion nothing has changed. There is no real community (community, like we had in our projects) - after my post I received opinions in style "go out". Some people want good, but the truth is, that Nokia is playing with us...again. There are new job places, but only in Finland. How can these Finnish people understand, what think people in other countries and prepare revolution project ? No support for some thing (once again: MMS ?). Nokia lost engineers ?

No, they have seen, that other companies are making money on "open source friendly" image. They want to do the same with small cost - it's probably cheaper to make few events, give some devices and take results of work from some good people (than give jobs for many talented developers in various countries). Device will be as closed as possible. N900 won't have few key things too and that's why Nokia will force some of us to buy N1000....

Sorry, but I don't see real SMS/MMS interfaces and many things, which could allow me to say - Nokia is really "open source friendly" company.

Some of you pointed, that I haven't prepared software. Yes. I'm not maybe very, very talented man. But I wanted to make some import software and similar stuff (yes, I haven't seen anything like this and I'm not sure, if Nokia will give us similar stuff). But SDK doesn't allow me for simulate BT connection. And I don't want to make unnecessary buzz on forums too.

One more note - I could work 8h hours per day for Maemo, but I need to eat, pay for bills, etc. too. Currently it's not possible with Nokia behaviour.

Yes, yes, yes... We're breaking user records on a daily basis here, the community has been doing nothing but growing since 2005. Users are coming together for everything from QA to proofreading the manual to translating strings to writing their own apps... and yet, "there is no real community"?

Go out.

How many Open Source has you created ? What is their ranking on the freshmeat.net for example ?

Could we keep the e-penis measurements out of this thread?

one more note (to comment, which has been deleted by author): nobody could blame Nokia, if they will say for example: MMS won't be available on the beginning, but we will give help/implement it during 12 months.

currently it looks like - you device, your problem.

California and India belong to the vast finnish empire than spans three continents?