Re: Ask the Council!
 

• Debian and Arch Linux under Software in the Public Interest...
• Mint completely independent

come to mind, indeed

only problem i can think of... GNU / Linux distros run on your standard PC, thus HW support is no problem; we have NITDroid which is tweaked to run on N9(00), but has anyone tried to run Maemo (Freemantle or Harmattan) on a standard ANDroid device?
may seem a trivial detail, but i think until we have that, sticking with NOKIA (i.e. hardware platform) would seem a prudent choice.

would we have the knowledgeable folks to write drivers for ANDroid devices? e-yes comes to mind, of course, but...

Re: Ask the Council!
 

a simple query needs a simple answer .
what is gonna happen with this maemo.org at the end of 2012 ?
what about the data on this site ?
what about the repos ?
what about the packages which are needed to be put in the repos at the first place and secondly travel from devel to testing and finally to extras ?
what about wiki.maemo.org ?
what about the flasher kernel ?
actually as a member of this great community, what i am worried about is to loose all the greatness related to this place ,is it simply gonna vanish in the air ?
where exactly maemo stands after 2012 ?
what about the devs who still are working on maemo packages and may be interested even after 2012 ?
do we own a platform in case this site is gonna un-reachable ,so there wont be a data or the questions which were answered in many threads here ?
If maemo.org really gets abandonded by those nokia men ,why isnt it possible for us to be accepted as an entity to meego.com when we are already having a portion for harmattan ?
So far,sorry to say but all i see is TROLL TALKS and there has not been any solution to current thing .
Can any one,among the council, sense the decision about maemo.org from nokians ?
i believe since i have been a member of this community for more than a year or so ,i am really concerned since i am greatly in love with this place & yeah probably these questions will be raised in every head here on this maemo planet .
please Talk to nokia if it is appropriate . thanks !

Re: Ask the Council!
 

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Re: Ask the Council!
 

Re "troll talks": let's be literal and avoid hyperbole, thanks.

Anyway, I'm not currently on the council, but I don't have to be to answer your question: no. Sure, people outside Nokia can guess and speculate, but that's all. Those inside Nokia can't or won't say. And those of us like jaffa and myself in the middle, we're not even supposed to speculate.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

No one knows yet so pointless to speculate. btw, maemo.org has never had a permanent funding.

The current answer is this:
http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...il/005031.html

Re: Ask the Council!
 

apparently smok[k]u did some foray into this as well, but that was nearly two years ago...
Running Maemo 5 on Android hardware

EDIT: for sake of completeness, some MeeGo perspectives
Porting Maemo/Meego to Android hardware - how plausible?
in the last post zehjotkah points to ARM/MSMQSD
it seems to end with MeeGo 1.1 (This page was last modified on 21 June 2011, at 22:21)

Re: Ask the Council!
 

Nokia pays the infrastructure at http://qt-project.org - but this is peanuts compared to the big team of Qt developers in the Nokia payroll.

http://qt-project.org/wiki/Nokia-and-Qt

Re: Ask the Council!
 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Qt never relied on any 3rd party closed source technology. So making it Free Software was Nokias decision alone.
That's different for Maemo. Even if Nokia would want to make Maemo Free Software there would still be the binary blobs like firmwares that are not under Nokias control.
And afaik due to some strange regulations it's impossible to access the US mobile networks with Free Software since you have to sign NDAs for that. (But I might be totally wrong at that point.)

So assuming that what I just said is only half-way correct it's completely impossible for Nokia to make Maemo (as a complete system) Free Software, even if they wanted to (which I seriously doubt in the first place).

Re: Ask the Council!
 

Actually that decision was Trolltech's (Qt was Free long before Nokia bought it). I think what SD69 meant above was that Nokia made Qt a community project with open development and governance, something laudable in itself but orthogonal to software freedom.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

I think there is a relationship (although it might be a tenuous grasp to let me segue into the question): what would this mean for Maemo? Nokia are not going to open anything which isn't already open. Is this the foundation of the aforementioned "non-profit legal entity"? Is it picking up on Graham's point about a perpetual distribution licence?

I have difficulty believing that if we have difficulty gaining more than five candidates for the Community Council, that it'll be easier finding people with enough drive, vision, time and skill to run a non-profit legal entity doing what the council does and a whole lot more.

There are three basic options for maemo.org (I've left off "be a general mobile internet device" site as I don't think it's viable):

1. Focusing on Maemo-related devices, developments and hacks. This covers the five steps between 770, through N8x0, N900 and N9(50).
2. Defocus on Maemo-related devices, expand on anything mobile running "mainline" Linux. This covers Maemo (including Harmattan), MeeGo, Tizen, Mer.
3. Focus on Nokia's Linux-based open devices. This is a superset of #1, but leaves the door open for whatever else Nokia might have brewing, if Linux is actually exposed (porting S40 to a Linux kernel doesn't count)

#1 is a recognition that everything's pretty much finished, and we're winding down/maintaining a niche. That's not a bad thing, it's just accepting that we're not going to be get Draw Something or $LATEST_SHINY_FAD.

#2 is risky, but might be a good position if Mer gets more widely adopted. MeeGo's effectively deader than Maemo already, so there mightn't be much change practically. Tizen is mostly vapourware, so would only be recognising that we might get a growth spurt if Tizen took off.

#3 is similar to #1 in the short-term, but with the hope/aspiration to be Nokia's go-to-community for any future Linux efforts. I don't know how much stock I'm putting in the rumours, but if it is low-end, the fact the kernel and userland are organised similarly may not bridge the gap between user experience and intended audiences. Of course, this might be exactly equivalent to #1.