Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

What do you think about reviewing code in light of:
http://gpl-violations.org/faq/violation-faq.html

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

No, money isn't all that matters to me, in fact it's one of the things that matters the least to me. Don't be silly.

While it's not very visible at times, I do help where I can and when people ask proper questions.

So, I'm going to give you an explanation of why this isn't going to work, without mentioning MeeGo even once, so we can move on to more productive topics.

* It is fairly likely that there aren't as big budgets for pro-bono stuff anymore, given the direction from Feb11.

* Definition: Open source contribution approval: A process that runs within Nokia that checks from multiple angles (IPR, business, etc) if it's possible to contribute a piece of software to open source. This requires legal checks and can take several months to complete, depending on the busy-ness of the queue. When a component is open sourced, it is clean and suitable for you to use without risking to be sued later on. This type of process is common in companies. This costs money and takes time.

* It is fairly obvious the Fremantle product program is dead and gone within Nokia. This means the people who would be able to sit down, apply licensing headers, modify sources and hand-hold the process of contributing the pieces to open source are probably gone. You could probably hire a person to do this (has to be a Nokia employee though), but again, a full-time developer costs money too (and fairly expensive).

* There's rumours about a next device 'coming soon'. Usually that brings along a portion of open source code which has to go through same process as above. This means there is a huge delay on how long it will take to get the Maemo5 source open sourced.

By the time all things are open sourced, it is likely that there might be no-one left that can deal with the software published. The amount of people who know Hildon and GTK+ (and I mean the ancient GTK+ we have) well as well as the monster Scratchbox is will diminish over time too.

There's also other factors, such as that the amount of end users still using N900 over time is diminishing. N900's are going out of warranty and power users are more inclined to try experimental software. N900's loose their USB ports (mine just did) as well. That means effort might be wasted as well over time.

My recommendation would be to develop replacement applications in Qt and Qt Quick for CSSU, just like MohammadAG has done with Media Player. But even with that, given advanced enough features, you need information on interfaces that might be even more difficult to get. Some might even have open source replacements instead.

My opinion is that instead, we should get ahead in the game instead of always being too late in the game. But I'll explain about that some other time.

I'll take your questions and hope to answer them.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

I will reply direct to save space Carsten.

I never did think but had to ask the motivation money has to you but as for the "red tape" involved to open source i think will get a push from the Poll and this community and as it takes time it could be a while before we get anything but i am sure something will happen sooner or later.

I also think by looking around if anything the N900 will actually gain popularity and will definitly become a collectors treasure simply because i cannot see anyone making such a device anything close the this one so even with dated hardware it will still increase in value in my opinion.

I agree with the your freemantle points but as this is Maemo.org and as long as people actually see some progress happening i very much doubt development will cease for a long long time yet.

I think it will boil down to open source replacement design specific to this device from the Communities own dev's so you will see a Maemo version adaptation based on those factors in the future.

I would love to bet though that for every N900 being sold on due to peoples desires for newer up to date that every single N900 will be snapped up and go up not down in value !.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the work you've done with now failed Mer project. I was looking forward to joining you, but once the meego was announced the project was simply "frozen".

Personally I don't care about any GUI or application such as Media Player. After all we have a GNU/Linux operating system and wide variety of software.

In the case of maemo (770, 800, 810, 900) the most critical part are low-level hardware related pieces (e.g. charging your battery without maemo). This effectively prevents any independent development of a distribution.

Are those closed-source pieces in violation with GPL?
http://gpl-violations.org/faq/violation-faq.html

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

This thread is just a huge amount of wasted energy that could have been spent elsewhere, on something useful, like fighting for equal rights between cacti.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

I highly doubt GPL violations has anything to deal with it.

So, for the N900 we have redistributable binaries for hardware support that you can use in your distribution. We needed that for MeeGo as well as anyone has to be able to make MeeGo images. While this isn't the best, it is better than to not have them at all.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

It is my experience that usually a good reason that can convince people weighs higher than a poll. We have long turnaround times even for simple stuff in MeeGo.

This is also what we thought about the N8x0's, so pardon if I doubt it :) There is of course always the danger of a "N950" having same effect as N900 had to N8x0.

Could you elaborate a bit on this one, I had trouble parsing it.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Yea, it looks like the competition who has bigger spines.

I especially dislike personal accusation employed by both stskeeps and abill_uk.

In this case stskeeps is not the one to decide on opening the source code, so lets see what is possible to do about it.

In this particular case, the only way of getting at least a portion of the code is to invest some time in checking for GPL violation. Even if there is proven violation (speculation on my behalf), it would take some time to enforce it. This can happen in friendly or un-friendly manner, where the first one is the preferred for both sides (nokia as a producer, and us as consumers).

The first case was tried already within bug-tracker and forums, so what do you think about exploring legal context?

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

While I basically agree with you, I have to say it's frequently maemo's middleware that's our problem. We got working replacements for battery charging (you noticed lately even backupmenu comes with charging?), what's missing are the interfaces to the higher levels, like hal-addon-bme to tell hal and thus whole system about battery state. Same for modem: we got semi-decent specs of the lowest-level interface, but we can't fix any bug in the higher levels of the stack (buzzword cell broadcast messages), nor implement an own dialer, unless we're going to replace 30% of maemo same time, as everything is linked to everything.
For general statement of "no other distro can run on N900" see e.g. SHR (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywkWb...eature=related comes with charging, and now also calls with audio in a beta state)

@stskeeps: how about inofficial out-of-major-release-turn bugfixes of single binaries then? Esp if they have a clearly traced down bug, that probably would need less than a man-hour to fix, given you've access to sources. Then inofficially "release" the binary and leave it up to community to do the evaluation and integration (can be done in cssu)
How about stupid plain header files that often come even without GPL as nobody really cares and never would deem them worth any (C)? Same procedure, push to $RANDOM, "leak" a URL to $RANDOM. No responsibility whatsoever for Nokia. Community will cheer.

Anyway thanks for bringing a bit of sense to this debate.
An occasional
request: open foo source
required for: bar
maintainer of request: Mr. X
estimated manpower: 2 manweeks to process and clean sources
Estimated state of lawyer queue: 9..18months
prognosis: in 9,5 months unlikely to help, in 18months obsolete
conclusion: suggest to request origin to go for BAR instead, XY could provide help
---
don't you think this would help a lot to feed us with some common sense about what's really up, and thus would help avoiding a lot of the high temperature that's arising from those issues seemingly getting completely ignored?

cheers
/jOERG

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

You may be wright, in that case we don't get to code. :(

I would expect Nokia to put an extra effort in avoiding GPL violation (at least V2, since V3 is not applicable at the moment to the kernel) but still let us hope they have forgot something.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

but you are still reading it regularly. :rolleyes:

I really can't digest everything written but people are making good points here, even most of them are sidetracking.

Say I don't see how asking for release source code to Maemo community would make MeeGo supporters as jumpy as such and end up in Maemo vs MeeGo debates. I thought it's beneficial to both, no?

Just a simple poll to express your view, your dream whatsoever. Come on, even I personally don't even believe that would happen, but this is just a simple poll.

http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000...8243.strip.gif

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

It will be "effected" for sure, there is no doubt in that

As an owner of 770 and n810, I did not like the multiple "effects" we had. I don't appreciate it at all.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Regarding binaries, I suggested something similar in the past and I think it might actually be possible to do without big hassle. But it requires someone doing the work and I'm not personally one to do it. Hardware support stuff, maybe, but GTK+/Hildon, no.

I'm trying to be informative about this process but people seem to overlook any blog post, tmo post or wiki post done about this.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Carsten if you read joerg_rw last post and you will see the answer to that remark i made you did not understand fully.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

I very much doubt a heavy handed legal approach would do anything else but stall Nokia's rattled determination to hold fast, rather a friendly request to bring back at least some of the lost customer support by releasing some or all of the code they have full control over.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Well based on the conflict you and stskeeps had, this is all but friendly conversation.

I am trying to offer reasonable course of actions. Please note that I don't wish to see a burning hole in place of Nokia's HQ.

Here is what I suggest: we do have option of asking politely(which includes 770, N800, N810 and N900), than hopefully receive polite yes/no answer from Nokia. Depending on the answer we can explore the further actions, including investigation if there is a clear GPL violation.

If there is an GPL violation, accepting of the "fixed" closed-sourced binaries would be equal to bribery.

On the other hand if there is no such violation, closed-source binary fixes are acceptable and only solution.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

You're misrepresenting what I said. That's rude.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Yes i fully understand where your coming from and going too BUT i have had many a litigation with various companies in my past and i can tell you once someone starts the legal routeof obtaining one's closed code they immediately button the hatches and give you a hard time closing the door on you forcing you to go the legal red tape routine.

Better to give them good enough reason to release that will be to there advantage, then if they agree, usually all the doors open for you.

I have a strong feeling this will be the best route with Nokia as they are no way short of legal representation.

I know for a fact they are reading this forum so they will know the situation going on and you just for-warned them hehehehe.

A lot of conditions would have to be met before release of anything for sure so more the reason for a soft approach, remember this code is not life threatning, or at least i hope not :p.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

This seems sensible and dicussable. There's no massive grab for the whole lot, just a means to fix what doesn't work and extend what does, while the platform is still alive.

On matters like this there are a lot of posts to look at so some of us are likely to miss bits (large chunks sometimes), apologies all the same.

Thank you for previous endeavours. Did you get a clear answer of what might be permissible? As far as who attends to this, well, if your ISP goes on te blink, you don't ask the nice chap down the road if you can have his monthly bndwidth; no, you contact the ISP and get them to reconnect and refund for the lost days. As kind as you might be, no one is suggesting you should do this (or anyone who isn't paid by Nokia for the task at had).
We have all paid, or are still paying, for our devices so the onus is on the manufacturer: Nokia.

Apologies if you object to my précis-ing. Just trying to trim the post!

Re: the request being polled for, can anyone clarify what the extent of Maemo is so we roughly know what the vote is for? Nokia could quite easily say something like "you've got it already," if it's not set out very clearly.

Re: releases of code to date, can anyone (apart from joerg_rw) confirm that items that the Maemo team (council?) have requested for some time and would really help with OS fixes/extensions has been provided to the Meego team?

Re: action following a "no" from a request to Nokia (& partners), it's not just GPL etc. that might be up for debate (I don't know enough to confirm one way or the other), it's the functional discrepency between advertised and actual performance, which would be of contention.

I am concerned about the number of bugs which are in the camp "oh it'll be sorted for Harmattan" (or Meego). What about areas which end up going in a different direction so fixes can't work on the N900, for example incompatible hardware or drivers?

In this vein, I'm very worried about the treatment of the N900/M5, if the N[?ever]/M6 device arrives. I'm surprised there isn't a thread called something like "Maemo6: shrug or hug?".

- can anyone alay these worries with M6?

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

It seems they have dug up already. At least based on what Stskeeps said on page 29. Besides, I remember one epic bug report requesting the opening of certain hardware components. There were like 200 posts there, and multiple open/close events.
All of them resolved as WONT FIX.
So I guess we are already in a red tape situation.

I like the fact they read it.

It is worth to note that in this case we have following entities:
1. policy makers (they don't read it at all, they are most likely very remotely connected to the project itself)
2. policy enforcers (project manager/architect, legal departments etc.)
3. common developers


Group 1 is beyond the reach, they simple don't read it

Group 2 is the one that keeps us locked at the moment (red tape). We see smaller part of them. They might read it.

Antagonising people from group 3 does not help, they can not help. In most cases they will remain silent(which is understandable) or redirect us to the policy or group 2.

We all know we can grab a shotgun (GPL). Wether on not we can find ammunition to shoot the bear that's another thing (I don't intend to hurt anybody :D ).

Reviewing the code itself is not a trivial task, and most people simply don't bother even if there is a clear case of violation.

If I were to pursue this approach I would avoid doing by myself alone, since the effort may not be worth of the results. On the other hand, a company/project producing the open-source software used within maemo might be more than interested in pursuing the matters.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

This thread can be shown to any business that considers releasing partial source for their operating system as a reason to remain entirely closed. All it does is spawn idiots with an inflated sense of entitlement that antagonise hard working developers. Good going folks.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Poll count today is 519 for and 21 against.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

When has Nokia answered any question with a polite yes or no? For example a thread lasting thousands of messages essentially asked when if ever Nokia was going to provide support for Flash 10.1 for the N900.

What was Nokia's official answer? Nokia NEVER bothered to answer the question officially.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

If we want an official answer we need to send a question to Nokia through official channels. A forum is not that.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Having worked for a major corporation that sold software it developed, I can say that whether a question asked by users was asked through official channels never was a consideration, not even once.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Having worked in similar capacities, I can easily say that it can be cause for consideration. Too often the necessary people aren't monitoring forums and will never see the request. Hell I've lived in here for 5 years and miss a lot.

But the cold reality here is that the situation straddles intersecting technical, political and legal lines. That's a ***** to unravel.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

It is all fine and dandy but... how open is open? How open is Linux? The kernel is, for sure... but what about the drivers? Are they all open? No. Why should it be different on the phone? I think that most of what could have been opened on this phone already has. The rest, as said a million times, most likely is proprietary and carries other implications.

Yes, you can always change a graphics card on a PC for one that is more OSS friendly but I think you have to accept that we cannot mess with the reality of the HW configuration we got.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

From another perspective as a former design engineer what can be done is to obtain data sheets on every single component requiring a driver and physically write the drivers into the os, run it as a loop untill no conflicts or halts occur but hell that is start from scratch situation and i do not envy any single dev to tackle it that way, so better a team get together armed with every single piece of data needed and work together creating with what is already available joining it all together untill you have something solid.

MeeGo adaption for the N900 needs ths team behind it to succeed hence why i am doubtful at this moment in time looking at previous work done up to what it actually is now.

What is really sad is on this Community already exsists enough devs to accomplish this but not all are part of the same team.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Perhaps you should remember how these devices were branded. If I recall correctly, the majority of developers were interested because of the promise of an open platform. At that moment nobody new about closed bits.

If you compare this program (770,800,810,900) to Neo Freerunner project, you will see that there are many different distributions some of them still providing builds for the original green phone. This project has also suffered because closed bits(infamous glamo chip), but has managed to stay open to community.

I agree with you that there is no point in antagonizing nokias developers. Given the fact that this request will be most likely ignored, do you have a better idea?

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

The first and major difference is that vendors usually support the graphic cards for several years. In our case support lasts from the point where one device gets released until next one get released. In this case we ended up with half-finished products.

This is precisely the reason the communities have started projects like:

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/


When I was younger, I thought the people like Richard Stallman are simply too militant. It looked like it is ok to have closed source drivers. Then one day nvidia decided to stop supporting graphic card, and I've found myself unable to upgrade to newer version of a distro without sacrificing 3d functionality. Since it was not crucial, there it went, but now there is a flood of all those shiny new 3D interfaces, what now?

Should I buy a new device, even if my old one is still functional?

Now, all of a sudden All that Richard was saying made sense.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Even if you start from scratch, buy replacing the drivers with your own implementation, you still have to obtain the technical documentation for each chip. This can lead to signing of multiple NDAs. Recent example for this mess was the Neo Freerunner Glamo chip. They never managed to obtain the complete documentation for that chip (at least legally).

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Did you bother to ask?

I did ask an official Nokia community representative (in context of Cordia) and got a clear "No" answer.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Nokia has answered that they do not intend to release the full source code of Fremantle.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Where ? when? show us the proof.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Yes, SD69, show us proof, because we have little understanding of why a company wouldn't just open everything up in a cutthroat, half-a-percent-counts competitive market.

I mean, what is there to lose? If only we could convince Nokia to publish source that isn't theirs, or works with secret, proprietary interfaces to hardware, or makes N900 unique, it'd all be so easy.

Why, everybody else has done it, why not Nokia?

It's not like Nokia would take a hit if identical software and identical (or better) hardware Chinese knock-offs would flood the market for 10% of the price. Or if Nokia would pay for servers and routing that Android apps can use.

You're being ridiculous, SD. We want proof of this nonsense.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

I almost missed the sarcasm. ;)

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Talk about sarcasm here. My heart is broken because Nokia is pressured to release closed bits of software within their products.

Nobody asked here symbian to be open-sourced. Nokia did not mind using the GPL-ed (in general) code, using it to beat competition, by they do mind if they need to release their own source code. Even if there is no proven violation, it is simply not moral.

Does anybody know how many lines of maemo code come from open sourced project, and how much from the nokia itself?
(e.g. how many years does it take to develop kernel itself, X, libc...)

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Out-of-topic: have you checked tag cloud recently?

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Thanks for the heads-up, deleted one tag here.

Re: PETITION to Nokia to release the full source code of the Maemo OS to this Community.
 

Nokia is a hardware manufacturer.