Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Now, while I agree with the sentiment, there is a little hole here wrt to the Maemo Qt schedule, and a pretty pivotal one - the end of 2009. The single most important announcement for me on the Maemo summit (Oct 09) was the 2010Q1 official Fremantle support for Qt4.6 (that was the coup-de-grace), followed by actual Qt4.6 packages in extras-devel in starting with Nov 09, with a planned release Mar 09. Thus, if there was any dilemma about the future, for me it was July-Oct 09 (which were not that critical as the N900 wasn't out yet), after that, the juggernaut was already moving and there was no way back.

IMHO the two mistakes with the transition were

• not being decisive enough to follow through the choice. There was a lot of mixed signals on the list 'if-you-code-for-today' and 'if-you-think-about-the-future', 'can-qt-do-this', 'does-widget-X-exist-in-Qt'... in retrospect (while I feel for people invested in GTK+/Hildon - and even have such stuff in Extras myself), Qt should have been driven much harder - the delay did not make it easier for Hildon people but did cause slight FUD wrt to how 'serious' the Qt future is, slowing down adoption.
• the other, orbital size mistake was tying Qt4.6 release with PR1.2. That single thing cost the platform literally 3 months of delay for no good reason.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Whenever you feel drowsy and suggest such an absurd idea to Nokia, just look at http://bit.ly/9fZvTu. It'll wake you right up again.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Oh the irony.. bugs.maemo.org is unavailable.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Huh. It's working from here.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

No way dude...

I'm hoping to see if some of the energy being spent here can be directed toward things we do have control over. That's all. No dis. :cool:

As a result I often add additional on topic content to my replies to specific questions asked in a thread.

And wiith that, to Dan's recent comment...




That ^ there goes to the heart of the matter doesn't it?

I'm thinking that when Maemo was first proposed within Nokia many in Nokia's uberclass didn't know what to think and that many of the "closed" components are not a result of specific design rather more along the lines of "Well, this is the way we always did it.".

I also imagine that many of the original coders were borrowed from other in house closed projects and after a specific time or a tasks completion, went back to those projects.

If this is the case then there pro'ly isn't a whole lot of policy continuity with regard to coded Maemo components and there may not even be accurate and easy to come by historical records available .

What ever the case, this again is water that has already passed under our bridge. Right now energy might be better spent retrieving as much Maemo information that we can from Nokia and asking someone as persistent as Texrat to undertake this task for us.

As it stands now, the only one I see that is paddling upstream in order to try and salvage some of this flotsam is qwerty12. I can only offer encouragement and help if his motives are what I think they are. :)

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

I wholeheartedly endorse this message.

However, it also begs the question of whether we in the open-source community really should be bothering with this platform if what we WANT is an actual, honest and open platform.

It was down for a bit.. but it's back up now. (I checked from another network and it was down for a short time.)

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

I read a few of those and had to stop, for all the blood-boiling it caused. It's bad enough that they sold me a device based on open-source and then pull this garbage.. but I can't even have the option of installing a lightweight version of Diablo on myN800 or even REMOVING some of those components to free up space for an actual open-source equivalent. Thanks for re-opening those wounds for me. >.<

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Man, I'm betting the Maemo Devices guys REALLY hate me now for that blog post... :eek:

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

If they do then their anger is misplaced. If anything, they should aim it up the chain at the people who are causing such horrible disconnects and failures.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

No kidding. I don't blame anybody, even in the company, for all this crap except the decision-making personnel of the company that decided that "community supported" means leaving locked-up bits in there and hiding information then saying, "GOOD LUCK!" as they stuff your dollars into their underwear and drive off into other affairs.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Wasn't that the ultimate goal of Mer? or at least as much as possible.

Since the base ran on both the N8x0 and the N900, it may be time to give stskeeps another call.

Sod Nokia! - Use Mer as a base, and build a common Desktop environment on top which will work on both N8x0 and N900, and get the community to do it's own thing and fork the hell away from Meego....

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Didn't you hear? Mer's dead, man.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Isn't it just pining for the fjords...? Seems to be the same place that Maemo seems to be hurtling towards.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

I'm really confused. If you want an open system, like Mer, then why don't you want MeeGo, where the aim is to provide ..an open system?

Stskeeps (and a lot of other familiar names) are helping out with MeeGo, both on the ARM/n900 hardware adaptation, and looking at the unofficial n8x0 port (see http://wiki.meego.com/ARM)

An introspective look at MeeGo from Mer's perspective: http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2010...redshirts.html

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

"...as much as possible". That's exactly it. Mer shows the closedness of Maemo. The browser was Tear because the browser UI is closed in Maemo, the connection manager was NetworkManager because Nokia's ICD2 and libconnui are closed, Powerlaunch had to be used because both MCE and System UI are closed source. None of these performed as well as the equiv. Nokia closed component. Hildon Desktop was built for it by removing the IPHB code (done wrongly, BTW: it should've called the GLib function adding the timeout source) and a newer Hildon Application Manager couldn't be built because it depended on a closed libtime-dev. As for the rest, I don't think Mer got far.

Nokia were happy to say that a Fremantle-like OS produced by the community will allieviate the need for them to bring updates themselves with the FiF fiasco, but, yet, they're not happy to give up their code (in the case of Diablo, code that is neither used nor updated) for the community. Hint: The community (excluding the members who like to be raped by Nokia and will come up with excuses for it) don't like double standards. I mean you're happy to put out that 80 percent of Maemo is open source. Well, that figures - most of that percentage consists of open source code not written by Nokia.

@gazza_d

Agreed. Maemo will die. There's only so much free components that you can bring updates to. Sooner or later, at least one of Nokia's many closed source components will break.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Yes, but its death had meaning. It was a good death.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

I was slightly tongue in cheek when I suggested Mer. In all seriousness, obviously Meego should be a better bet

However, reading this thread does reveal to me a distrust from many people in Nokia's roadmap for the future of what are currently maemo devices.

There also seems to be a concern that previous mis/steps/takes will re-occur, and that closed source components, and application compability breaks between platforms/OSs will cause further fragmentation and other problems within the Maemo/Meego ecosystem.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Dancing the same steps to a new tune...

http://i28.tinypic.com/2qvfuw2.jpg

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Well... kind of open.

Some counter-examples: "Compliance" criteria are starting to become clear - you will be required to ship all of the MeeGo core components, and not any replacement components for them; to be called MeeGo. How these core components are decided on, and by who, has never been clear, and it appears to be as much by negotiation between commercial partners as it is technical merit.

One example: ConnMan instead of Network Manager. Core component, but no compelling technical arguments - and in fact Novell's Moblin used Network Manager, and they are now being forced to move to ConnMan. Every other Linux distribution in the world has settled on Network Manager, and MeeGo is backing a different horse, because one of the commercial partners has invested in it. Not technical merit, not open decision making.

Within workgroups, different components and applications will be included. So, for example, Evolution Express and Banshee were included in MeeGo Netbook, in spite of being GTK+ applications - primarily because a partner (Novell) pushed for their inclusion, and Intel forced them through. Where's the open roadmap & component selection?

Yes, the project aims to be open, and I'd like to see that happen, but plainly it isn't yet. What you have are people like Arjen justifying decisions which are made behind closed doors once they've been announced - the community is faced with a fait accompli. I don't mind a small number of people having a say on components, but I'd like that say to be recorded somewhere so that the greater community can understand the reasons for choices.

Dave.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Sure, if you accept an n8x0 (don't really care about the n800) that cannot charge its battery, suboptimal wifi, no more than 10 minutes of life, no sound (the drivers were specifically removed from the linux-omap tree) you can do that (you could also, possibly, run meego under those constraints).

Edit: didn't read qwerty12's reply which expressed what I wanted to say much more clearly.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

The charger chip will do so automatically, BME doesn't magically grant the ability to charge.

How so?

Do explain?

Err, IIRC it was the touchscreen drivers, and just because they've been removed doesn't mean they're 100% gone (unless you think they went and retroactively purged them.)

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Well, this one has been "fixed" :p

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Ah, open-source DSME...

That's right! We'll remove all the useful code (what is it now in Fremantle you ask? A glorified app launcher, that's what) and move it to MCE (we're still keeping that closed, BTW).

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Not on the 770, N800 or N810.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

But doesn't the BME provide the OS with the ability to manage power more efficiently and to know when the tablet or phone is nearly out of power?

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

A side-effect of this component/compliance gerrymandering is that at this point Fremantle is MeeGo compliant, too. Kind of funny, eh ?

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Dave,

Before I get into it, I'd just like to thank you for your reasoned, and well written reply. I don't fully agree with you, but well, life would be boring if we all got on.

The 'open' there that I was using was that the code is available, as a whole, which, as far as I know is being stuck to fairly rigorously for all released components so far.

How open MeeGo is in practice (that is, as an organisation, and as a whole) is a bit of a different story, and not one I want to pass judgement on yet. But if they prove to not be living up to the speak, then by all means.

Personally, I see no problem with this idea. If you want to use the naming, then you have to avoid fragmentation, and be as identical as possible. If you don't want to use the naming, do whatever you want. That sounds like a sensible enough aim.

What I don't agree with in that respect is that the compliance story isn't open to community input, despite repeated requests, from people like yourselves, and I think that deserves a lot more scrutiny.

Have you brought this up somewhere? Not specifically this decision, but this issue, that architecture choices should probably be explained and reasoned?

Not that it may make much difference *at this stage*, because as you rightfully point out, there are a few people making the decisions - but process would be nice.

And yes, I fully believe that there is probably room for political manoeuvring in those discussions. To believe that politics has no place whatsoever in technical decisions is a pretty naive thing, so I won't go there.

The development for that release was done entirely behind closed doors. That the components in it weren't chosen by the community should not come as a surprise.

That Banshee and Evolution are included should also be no surprise, given the Netbook release is pretty much Moblin with a few bits tacked on, just like I rather expect the handset release will be a new Maemo frontend+apps tacked on to a frankenstein Moblinish base.

For the record, I'd also like to say that I think this is - if anything - a good thing. It means that hopefully all isn't lost with regards to toolkit co-compatibility and we're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Qt is great, and it's nice to have an officially sanctioned platform for reasons of educating newer developers, etc - but choice is a powerful and important thing. (and if anything, I'm biased, by beng both a hobby and professional Qt guy)

Though I think it's unrealistic to expect documentation on the choices made for 1.0 (realistically, a lot of that is going to be "this is working so let's use it" and so on), I'd say this is something that needs discussing, through the proper channels - not here. Not sure what they are for this kind of case, though. dev list? TSG?

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Well, I've seen some of the replies of old forum posters and developers, so I thought I'd bring in the view of a regular Joe.

Please excuse Regular Joe, he's a bit unpolished.

Great. Hey, I'm happy for you. You do realize that I don't see them, since I don't run MeeGo. Great for marketing, though.

When do you expect to see unstable M5 bugfix releases?

I know that M6/Meego is Nokia's future, but I'd give it all for a nice feature pack for N900. I don't know what I'll be running in a year.

*raises hand*

Someone had to say it. Regular Joe is here to take one for the team.

"Why?", you ask in my imaginary world.

Here you go: Imagine you and a few friends go up and build this awesome treehouse. Complete with painted "No girls allowed" sign, windows, the works. It will be your masterpiece.

You cash in your allowance for the next 6 months, buy the wood, and you and your friends start building. In a couple of months, they show up with what they have done for you open platform -er- treehouse. We all happily build the doors, while someone brings over an old fridge to keep juice in, which was deemed too much by Dad, who thought MMS would be too much. I mean fridge, fridge would be too much. For the treehouse.

About a quarter way through the build, Jim, the neighbor kid comes over the fence and says that he's building an even bigger house, and his dad, let's call him -say- Intel, is helping him build it. They all go over the other side and happily start helping.

Sure some of them come over from time to time, buy/make all the nice stuff will be in the bigger house, and you can't build an even bigger house because your platform is now old, with design limitations. Plus, you've spend your money on wood and his house is all carbon fiber.

With time, they either bring stuff over that is temporary, meant for Jim's house once it's done, or they stop bringing it over and saving it. Also, they help halfheartedly, some too tired from working over the fence.

What's worst is not that by the time your house is done it will be old. It's not that theirs will be bigger and finished first. What really hurts is that at the rate they help, it might never be finished.

Jim is not my enemy because I don't make enemies over tree houses, platforms or versions. But if I just moved Jim to the top of my list out of spite.

Maybe it will go away if I'm allowed in his cool new treehouse and abandon my pile of wood. I'm having a hard time forgetting Jim put up an official sign that I'm not allowed in. I hope my relation will warm up.

Didn't Maemo say the exact same thing, before not needing me any more? Wasn't N900/Fremantle the best and opennest yet, a promise for the future, a look up, etc?

Doesn't that mean that if I do help, the next version will need me because it will be the opennestestest?

Also, I think you misspelled Nokia. It's not Meego that needs me, it's Nokia that needs me. As it needed me to believe in a platform, purchase it, and then close my suggestion as DONTCARE when I wanted a feature that helps me manage my contacts (number labels), keep track of birthdays (age after name), set alarms (not on day before for birthdays).

All of those are non-ridiculous, easy to fix stuff my 7650 did in 2002. Or was it the 7110? I'm pretty sure 7110 had age after name in 1999. "It was announced in February 1999 and released in October 1999[2]. Nowadays, it has achieved cult status and is considered to be one of the most stylish cellphones ever made".

I don't recall Nokia needing me to believe in that phone.

What you need is more people who believe in the platform (no matter what you make of it), believe in the release (until it gets changed), and keep believing. I agree completely. You need more of THOSE people. I wish you luck, those people are hard to find, especially since you don't pay them, they pay you.

If Contacts is bound by Nokia internal todo list, and Meego is bound by its internal todo list, what exactly do you need me for? Stand outside and project my support with a sign not caring what's on it?

I swear, if it wasn't so bitter I'd have it as a signature: I believe in OS 2006 (crossed out) OS 2007 (crossed out)
OS 2008 (crossed out) Maemo 5 (crossed out) Maemo 6 (crossed out) MeeGo (crossed out) Whatever comes after that!

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

(I had to break the post)

Exposed <> open, supported, documented, backwards of forward compatible.

Also, you say it like it's a good thing. What exactly does the above mean to me, the end-user?

That is an incredibly specific question. Bugs.maemo.org has a few answers of regressed functionality, but my focus is on the specific of the question.

Maemo has the same design guidelines as Maemo, and things that didn't work in M5 will keep on not working in M6. Reversing the statement and saying that what worked in M5 will work in M6 isn't adding value to the statement.

Additionally, while some people are upset about not getting M6 or whatever they are upset about, what I have a problem with is the apparent shift in development effort.

I know you fixed 100 bugs in M5 1.2, but out of those about 5 affected me and about 2 annoyed me. Outside those, I have about 20 others that annoy me, varying from WONTFIX to "NEW".

2 bugs in 6 months, and now the focus shifts? I'm worried.

----

In closing, I'd like to state that I am aware I'm bitter. I am not a chronically bitter man. But things have been going from bad to worse.

I was pretty down with the litany of missing stuff from PR 1.0 and PR 1.1. I am not an expert, but people here on the forums, some old developers, lament the closed source, curse the manuals and some have even abandoned their applications in frustration, tired of guessing DBus, having packages break compatibility and lack of fixes.

And on top of that, every time I let out a scream and rant there's always someone who's been here through other OS releases saying this has happened again.

Want to cheer me up? Fix a bug in an application, release an update in -devel for that application so I feel like *someone* is actually working for me.

Even more? I waited months for that app store. I'm ashamed to even bring it up. Look over the fence. 150.000 apps and growing! Five million downloads! Me? I have 20 apps, 5 nice, with one being Fennec.

I thought my phone was broken when I saw a 1967 cartoon episode FOR SALE. And a desktop background! For sale!

What, Google Images broken?

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

I think the legacy support and evolution for the iphone OS is something to be applauded but I figure Nokia cant be bothered to create a device that would compel people to buy it on its hardware specs alone.

Its back to smash, grab and run with the money and move onto a new area with respect to the clueless mass market. Cowboy builders use the same approach.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Why should they? Look at the community...
You have only summarized whats going one here the last months. You have collect it for them. Now they can easily look at it, go thru the list and hopfully learn...

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Nokia needs to fire the top brass simple, that is the only solution. All this R&D money spent positioning themselves for future market play was a waste, Nokia's leadership has only positioned themselves for failure.

Folks time for trying to reason with Nokia are over, they are incabable of listening. Their position in the world has taught them only way, to plow forward and never apologize. They aren't going to acknowedge our issues, nor do they care if Maemo is obsolete leaving N900 to be the quickest to EOL product. So what we want or may want won't be coming forthrigt. As consumers we can only speak with our wallets, and voice our opinions to potential buyers of the Nokia brand. Sites like Engadget, I won't correct them on false or ill-informed posts I won't endorse the company that treats me and others like dirt. Again not anything to do with the N900, it is a product amongst many. Why I'm passionate about this is that this is a culture, and not even a culture that enhances their profitability as they keep losing money:

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/...q2-and-fy2010/

So I oppose this featurephone business model being used on the smartphone game. Nokia you are losing credibility, the boss must quit and the top brass must be fired, this culture needs to be washed out. Also the N-Series should not cater to Symbian, Symbian belongs on the E-series, X-series, C-series, and S40 on featurephones ... the N8 is a waste of time and dilutes the strategy.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

IMHO the problem is not Banshee/Evolution per se, but that those two releases had no right to be called MeeGo 1.0, because they are not that. I'm not sure marketing people understand the damage they are doing and what the collateral component grandfathering can cause on the long run (especially considering the sentiment on the meego-dev list... scary).

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

OK, I think I followed your metaphor, up to this point. What in the world does this "official sign" represent? I see a bunch of old Maemo hands (especially the Mer guys) over there, who are apparently represented by your friends who are now helping Jim. But you're saying you specifically are disallowed from Jim's treehouse, does this mean you specifically, or a certain Average-Joeish subset of the Maemo community in general, are in some way disallowed from MeeGo? Did I miss some snub of the Maemo community by MeeGo? AFAIK the only reason Average Joes aren't mucking about with MeeGo is because it's only half-done, not because they've been deemed unwelcome.

The nearest I can come up with (and I feel like I'm really reaching here, so I'm quite possibly wrong) is that this is a reflection of the notion that, because there's no official MeeGo-on-N900 release, there won't be an end-user ready one at all. If so, I think you badly misread Jim's official sign.

I do understand where that idea comes from -- after all, Nokia said more or less the same things about non-official, but more-or-less Nokia-funded community backport of Maemo 5 to the N8x0, named Mer. It was supposed to be the equivalent of the old OS200xHE backports to the 770, only now community-driven so we wouldn't have to wait on Nokia for update and bugfixes. And it died without progressing from hacker's toy to end-user OS update.

Now, we're told that there'll be no official Maemo6/Harmattan/MeeGo/whatever release for the N900, but it's being adapted to the N900 because (for now) the N900 is the standard ARM dev platform, and Nokia's dropping hints, though not promising, that you should be running a bright shiny community build on your N900 in six months to a year. And there's reason, I grant, to suppose that, as this is equally non-official, it'll be equally dead when the next device arrives.

But there's at least one major difference that I've not seen mentioned at all:

• The N8x0->N900 transition was a huge hardware jump, from an OMAP2 platform to OMAP3. Since many system components (including a bunch of closed ones that might have been made redistributable) depended, directly or not, on that hardware shift, you couldn't just run the new userland on the old hardware with just the kernel and some low-level drivers swapped out. To get a good port, access to the source of many of these would be required, or writing a replacement from scratch.
  
• The N9 (or whatever the first Meego device is -- I'll call it N9 here), by all (unconfirmed) leaked reports, is an OMAP3, and specifically an OMAP3640 -- essentially identical to the N900's OMAP3430, but with a process shrink and higher clocks. While this similarity doesn't necessarily make it legal to procure a copy of Nokia's Harmattan release for the N9, mash it up with the latest hackers-only N900 build, and come up with what amounts to a Harmattan-N900 build, I think it will make it technically straightforward, and going from there to legal will only require Nokia to make some closed components redistributable to owners of previous Nokia devices, not open-source or even globally re-distributable -- much easier to push through.

There's also the whole point that MeeGo's aiming to be more open and more upstream-aligned than Maemo 5, which should also ease things (i.e. much less, if any, platform-level stuff will be obstacles), but that's been hashed around already.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

My attitude at the moment is to just mostly ignore MeeGo until there's actually something compelling for me to care about. I don't care about Harmattan because it is completely intangible. I think I'm not alone.

When a real MeeGo with a full set of functioning drivers and the reference handset UI hits the Internet, I will become much more interested.

I know I can't be alone. I bet there's a huge number of capable developers and community members who are sitting on the MeeGo sidelines waiting to see what will happen.

Until then, I will just keep working on my Maemo stuff*, and learning Qt programming and RPM packaging on the side. Honestly, how can we be expected to do anything else?

* I need beta testers for the extended mimetype handler package (currently called dbus-switchboard)...

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Well, I have my hopes up on MeeGo, not being enthusiastic though, but I do have my hopes up.. here's why.. Symbian have always got all the support from Nokia because it was the high-end OS basically.. But now since MeeGo is now the high-end OS, I believe they will support it pretty well... This is just my 0.02 cents tho.. We will have to wait and see..

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Not over yet. If it were, we wouldn't have this conversation. There's still time to bank left. Will they? Unlikely. We'll be here, waving arms an pointing at the iceberg.

That may as well go down as one the worst moves in Nokia's modern history.

You see, most people that jumped to tablets were already Nokia clients. When moved to tablet, they were MOVED from the overall buyer base.

Losing them won't make them jump back to N8, but to a competition tablet. I will. I'm not buying a dumbphone, I don't care if it films in 4K.

Plowing tablet division in the ground will not be free.

I don't think they will intentionally do that. Nobody's that disconnected. It is entirely possible for the buyer base to become slimmed through this "upgrade" they do.

Will they come back? Who knows?

Will it have an impact knowing that tablets and internet phones are now jumping sales like mexican beans? Oh yeah.

When business waves happen, you either go with it, or you don't; It's a LOT easier to keep a market share if you're fighting for a percentage of a growing market. If you stagnate, the others will grow past and your share will decrease as a percentage.

My wallet and I I no longer on speaking terms following THIS purchase. (I kid, I kid)

I never could understand this either. Nokia used to be German in order and thinking. 1 for low end and car kits, 2 for low, 3 for better, 5 for medium, 6 for slim, reliable business, 7 for the tech, 8 for style over features, 9 for feature over form. You used to look at a design and guess "61...what?"

Then we had the more ambiguous N and E. N was tech-oriented, E was business oriented, which is bad enough, because E has -e.g.- office, software. So basically the old N who had better hardware lacked in applications.

Then N80 (and higher end N) had office. Which is the point I stopped caring. I think they're down to coin toss now. "And then there was X".

Sorry, that "official sign" was supposed to be a link. The link was to a post that was the original announcement (or wave thereof) in which it was announced that MeeGo will not be supported over N900.

Ok, I'll be more correct and say "You can come, but no juice and we won't talk to you".

Yes. No official support means no bugs, no direct fixes. Look at the rate of support for officially supported releases.

You can run, but with no rights. Come, but no juice and we will pretend you are not really here.

I can adjust this indefinitely, but it's a metaphor and as a result, not identical to the situation. The fact remains that "dropping hints" of an unsupported install is DEFINITELY worse than what we had with M5.

And M5 was SO finely supported. Hey, maybe we can just get the platform and rebuild phone and patc... wait, those are still closed.

Either it's official and updates ripple through to us and we move forward software-wise, or they just build one to shut us up, at which point no updates (or some) for M5 and no updates for M6.

I wouldn't mind no updates. My DSLR has no updates, even though it's flashable. But you know what, I've hit the shutter over ten thousand times. NOT ONCE has it misfired, delayed, mistook, failed to write, thought about it. never have I set the aperture to 4.5 and have it be 3.5. never has it taken an image at ISO 3200 by mistake.

I could go on, but I'll summarize. Zaroo bugs, knowing it is a complex piece of machinery that constantly adjusts for wear, dust, a lens that was made by third party.

You won't see me at Sony forums crying for an update. There's a 1.01 or something that updates file format to ARW 2.0 and increases speed of who-cares-what. I couldn't be bothered, BECAUSE IT'S NOT BROKEN.

Fremantle is.

I'm sorry, I don't follow. I have no experience with Linux. Back over here, we have this thing called a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer), where the OS works with the HAL and it mounts drivers underneath it, making hardware transparent for the OS.

Using this, one can run the OS over the same architecture simply by swapping drivers and adding a few mods to the UI to incorporate the differences in drivers. It's what allows me to swap my video card without installing a new OS.

I wish Linux had that.

(I am just being difficult, there is no need to enlighten me)

As for the back-release of drivers and open source, what can I say, I wish I was optimistic as you. Could happen.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Just so you know, you're not alone--I feel the same way. Personally I think all this talk about MeeGo, and that it's not (officially) coming to the N900 is a little premature. I think the real question should be if we even want MeeGo or not. Right now, I'm not so sure I do, as it's a completely unknown quantity.

The allure of Maemo, and potentially MeeGo, for me was that I could use Linux/Gtk/Gnome programming know-how that I already had and apply it to a mobile device. That's something that is really unique to Maemo/MeeGo, and it's more or less the only reason I bother messing around with Nokia despite their flagrantly poor handling of the whole thing.

Now, I'd love it if I could get those same things with MeeGo, hopefully with some more mainstream appeal thrown in. Now that would be something I'd be interested in. But the real question is: Can Nokia actually make that happen? Sometimes I just don't know for sure...

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Sorry for the second post, but I feel I need to clarify a bit: I am afraid to contribute to MeeGo at the stage it is at now, because it is still all policy and planning. There's nothing really yet to file bugreports on, nobody in the giant corporations making the policy and doing the planning really cares about my opinions, and the actual coding that's going on isn't really open yet...

I have a good recent example. A few weeks ago, I got an e-mail from a Nokia employee who asked me some questions about my Easy Chroot scripts because they might incorporate some of the code into the MeeGo chroot installation.

He asked me some questions, and I helped him as much as I could, and then I suggested that we continue discussing this on a mailing list or forum or somewhere else public. His answer was very non-committal and I've heard nothing since.

Honestly, how do community members contribute to a project such as this, with paid developers working madly behind the scenes, with very little incentive to discuss things publicly, and the whole system still in flux?

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

The take I get is that as long as Maemo 5 is supported (mostly for bug fixing and updates for things like Flash) for a decent amount of time, many people share those sentiments.

Now I feel "decent amount of time" is 2 years after launch-- but then, launch has been scattered across regions and dates so that can get sticky. How about 2 years after last launch?

But I'm doubtful that it will. And if it doesn't, that tells me Nokia doesn't quite get the mobile computer business... which will bode badly for MeeGo devices.

We'll see.