i was also wondering is those applications/games from the nokia and maemo websites which are possible to download now are they safe for the device or some of them are to use at your own risk ? because i have seen couple of posts where people been saying that it is at your own risks to use and it could damage your device..

Thanks

There are 3 repositories - places where programs are stored - for Maemo.

There's 'Extras', 'Extras-Testing' and 'Extras-Devel', I think those are the correct spellings, but I might be off.

Everything that you can access by clicking on the 'Download' link at the top of the site, and then everything on the Nokia site, I assume is in Extras and is 100% safe. Everything you get from the Application Manager on the phone by enabling Extras is safe too.

Extras-Testing is mostly safe, but applications may be buggy and cause some crashes or bad battery drain.

Extras-Dev is where the dangerous stuff can be.

In short: If you're worried about messing something up, just stay inside of Extras. Stick to the downloads from the Maemo main site, the ones from Nokia sites, and the ones from the application manager. You should be safe with those.

While Extras aren't as buggy as the other repositories, some (or many) projects are works in progress. They shouldn't destroy your device but they may freeze it, refuse to work as designed, or be of limited usefulness. Such is the way with open source. OTOH, they can also allow you to do things that more restrictive app stores (and I'm talking about you, Apple) would not allow.

I wouldn't say that's the way of open source (but indeed open source has those very same problems as everyone does).

As a major user of FOSS via SourceForge, it is an unfortunate truth that open source software is released earlier in the development process than much closed source, monetized software. Except for major projects such as OpenOffice or Firefox, much of open source is developed by small teams of dedicated coders and code is released while still in beta.

This has pluses and minuses. But one of the minuses is that users do much more testing than they might expect if they are unfamiliar with open source. Another minus is that developers sometimes move on without anyone to pick up development. This should be less of a problem for the N900 at the moment but there are plenty of Diablo posts to the effect of "is anyone still working on this?"

It's not an 'unfortunate' truth - release early and release often is a good thing. The trick to getting stable free software is to wait for it to percolate through a few layers of testing and bug fixing first. That's how Fedora Rawhide can be one of the scariest desktop OSes to run, but RHEL is the most utterly boringly dependable.

By the time something's made it from maemo-devel, through maemo-testing and into maemo-extras it should be fairly well filtered.Pulling stuff directly off Sourceforge, while occasionally useful, is an altogether hairier proposition.

The validity of this statement depends GREATLY on the development process for a piece of software. Also it depends to a slightly lesser degree on the intended audience and market space.