Re: Nokia Booklet 3g + Meego = No no?
 

I'd say some of the people who were on here before everyone else knew the strengths and weaknesses of the Maemo devices. I remember myself when I came here asking about the device [n800 in question]. I knew full well that this wasn't a device for most people out there.

And for my part, I've been doing the same for people who ask about this device. Most of the time I wind up steering people away (when it's clear they shouldn't be using a device like this). But the behavior of some of the posters now can't be justified by "sticking around to warn other potential buyers"

Yup.

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

Heh... I would, except some disagree with it even being mentioned. ;)

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

Well, regardless of whether or not you care if the n900 gets flash 10.1 you would have to agree that the silence is deafening.

Another point I strongly agree with is the benefit of the community assisting with QA/bugfixes. If we had the ability to resolve bugs and add features to Maemo the same way that apps are approved this device would take a huge leap forward within a matter of weeks.

I'm not saying that the devs at Nokia aren't working hard enough or that their fixes and enhancements aren't good enough. On the contrary - despite its faults the n900 is an amazing device with an amazing "personality" and it gets better every day. But I think that the power of 1000s of people working towards the same goal can be a very powerful thing :D

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

About "MeeGo-Harmattan" see the reply in the corresponding thread and follow there on this topic if you are interested:

Renaming "Maemo 6" to MeeGo / Harmattan

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

About PR1.2 Closed Testing, couldn't find any thread discussing this but if there is one please point to it or if you want to discuss further please create on and let's move the discussion there.

The semi-open testing for PR1.1 was an interesting experiment that was found to be less than more useful. And not because of the contributions received (very good ones) but all the context forced by this situation. The root of the problem was again to mix open source expectations with a commercial release made of open and proprietary components.

The real thing comes when you can separate open from closed, public from confidential. See what is being cooked at http://wiki.meego.com/Quality_Assurance_Team + http://wiki.meego.com/MeeGo_Release_Creation which fulfils (and if those guys get it right exceeds) the expectations of those of you running alpha/beta/pre-releases of your favorite piece of open source software.

No corporate confidentiality, no certifications, no legal liabilities, no peer/media pressure to know about something confidential... all this in a context of public release process and calendar defined by weekly unstable releases where fixes can be fast integrated and verified.

The experiment of PR1.1 was interesting but couldn't be repeated and even less scaled without putting Nokia and the testers under counterproductive tension and risks.

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

I just want to agree with that and I have a puppy here which is nice and gentle and friendly -- if anyone repeats that quote again, I 'm going to kill this puppy!

Just kidding, but now that I have TWO N900s I feel really entitled to voice my criticism, so the gloves are off!

And I really wish this site was not sponsored by Nokia.

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

texrat, the rest of points you raise are related more to commercial than to maemo.org / open source / community / developer aspects. Out of my scope, and the best I can do is to help getting the right people/channels to communicate this not to maemo.org but to the whole N900 customer base.

I can brainstorm, discuss and even joke publicly about the topics related to the area I'm responsible of (open source / MeeGo / Maemo communities). I have this freedom in order to do efficiently my job in the community channels. But I simply can't speculate or announce anything somewhere here on commercial topics that the Nokia spokespersons or official channels haven't announced yet.

As Nokia N900 customers you could better organize your feedback around Nokia Care or Nokia Conversations rather than here in a community forum.

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

So what does that say for MeeGo?

I'm really concerned...

Yes, for end users, but I don't see that for power users, testers, developers and other leaders. I tried engaging those forums from such a perspective and was put off. They really have no infrastructure and process for differentiating levels of user engagement it seems.

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

I'll toss out a conjecture:

Anyone running the Nokia official builds of MeeGo on their MeeGo based devices will have to deal with what we just went through with PR1.2.

Those that switch to the community build will likely have a faster update cycle, unless someone thinks it a good idea to throw a wrench in the works.

Hit? Miss?

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

And to finish with http://tabulacrypticum.wordpress.com...teps-for-2010/

If the expectation and the parameter of measure is "open source" then yes, Maemo has been carrying many problems, in fact since its origins. Ultimately these problems go down to the mixture of open and closed components and processes, that impede to satisfy the expectations of an open source community. MeeGo is the solution proposed to this problem, aiming to push an open project with open dialog, evolutionary architecture and releases, all around a developer community.

If the expectation and the parameter of measure is "mobile platform" then I believe Maemo still is better than many alternatives in terms of openness, dialog and community. Product continuity is another story, but again if you look at the obstacles you will find that they are rooted in the closed/business parts of the project.

And well, it's always easy to blame the closed/business side of things but in the case of Maemo they have been crucial making this project scale in the agenda and priorities of a company like Nokia, instead of ending up like other alternative that didn't have such closed/business driver but then...

This is a company releasing products, competing in markets. Our salaries to do this work and the big investment to make these products come from somewhere. The community is extremely important but without the business all we would be somewhere else now.