Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark

See? You're doing same again during first 5 words you answer to my complaint.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Again you do the thing you accuse me of. I said nothing about LGPL allowing Nokia to publish closed blobs.

I said, rather clearly, that the site in it's whole was owned and copyright by Nokia/Nemein. And that as such they had full legal rights to claim large chunks of that was "work for hire", which they technically own and must protect as a company. They chose to not make all of that "FOSS", mainly because they were not sure how much of it may or may not contain things they don't want public, and had no time, desire, or manpower to check. Instead they chose to transfer those rights to another legal entity, and HiFo was that legal entity.

The topic of "blobs" was as separate one, where you have been claiming "everything is FOSS", including device images and the like. Clearly the EULA indicates that not to be the case, and since the images fall under the EULA (which even you agreed to, having used at least one Nokia product in this family line), they are not something we can redistribute.

Again, you may make that legal argument with any court you want, on your own dime. But I (and HiFo, and those involved) do not want to fight that fight, because I/we were of the belief that there is legal ground for Nokia's point of view. We did try to negotiate this with Nokia, several times, and got a firm "these are the conditions" each time. Our choices were, accept those conditions, or tell them no and have them turn the servers off. And if you think for an instant Nokia would not have their legal team show up at IPHH to enforce that order, and reclaim the servers and contents on them, then your daft.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Err, the conditions of Nokia were to deny the objective truth of midgard being FOSS as well as stuff that OUR maemo techstaff wrote being FOSS? That doesn't make any sense to me.
Sorry when I can't help but suspecting that it's been the poorly phrased question rather than the notion of those who answered which been the major color in this paint.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Back to other people besides Joerg...

Yes, with stipulation. There are legal proceedings required to spin down a corporation. (Filing papers, announcements, etc.) There is also a required time frame for this to happen in, to give collectors time to submit claims against the corporation before it goes away. We really should have none of those, but the time frames still apply, since there's no way to "prove a negative".

Which is always the question. The banking issue is, in fact, the thing holding everything else up right now. Banks are picky about setting up accounts, doubly so for corporations and e.V. apparently. The desire would be for all on Board to have access rights, which is why that option is being sought after. But it's hard to find a bank willing to do this.

Understand, I was not picking on Joerg for his language usage unprovoked. Several here are non-native speakers, and I get that, and try to read intent through whatever broken grammar there is. I speak 3 languages, and know 4 (one is sign language), and I'm far from proficient in any of them. I know how hard it can be to properly express oneself in a non-native language. There are several posts (in this thread alone) with improper grammar, mixed word usage, or improper phrasing, and you don't see me correcting any of them, do you?

That's because most don't have the audacity to claim a native speaker is:
Imagine if I were to butcher something, posting in the child-level German that I vaguely recall from classes decades ago. Then, when someone doesn't understand what I'm saying, I become belligerent and accuse them of being too ignorant to speak their own language. Sorry, but anyone doing that, in any language, gets what the deserve when others correct their own improper usage. Even native speakers will do that against each other when one picks on anothers grammar. Tit for Tat is the English term for that.

I get his point: That he feels I'm not interpreting what he says correctly. That can be frustrating. Yet when the same thing happens the other way, where he misinterprets what someone else says, it's clearly all their fault for saying it wrong. And convincing him of reality one he's interpreted something in his head is near impossible.


And yes: I will admit there are times I do this myself. But whens someone clearly says "Stop. That's not what's happening at all. Let me explain." I generally give them the option to do so, and am open to the possibility that there was misinterpretation somewhere.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

See http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...90#post1441290, you either didn't read it or didn't get it. Perverting simple aristotle's traditional logic is not a smart thing to do in *any* language. I say X and you bash me for saying Y. I say you abuse language or ignore logic or whatever. And you again perverted my words.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

Sigh... This is nothing to do with MidGard being FOSS! It really doesn't. MidGard is, in fact, a sell-able product via LGPL. Bergie specifically put MidGard under LGPL so he could SELL CM sites to companies, where they would be the legal owner of the resultant site, including any customization they needed. This was the entire business of Nemein, creating CM sites based on MidGard, and selling those sites (and occasionally ongoing service) to companies.

Nokia doesn't know MidGard from vBulletin. They purchased a site, with maintainance, from a vendor, and had them add custom things to it over time. That includes the licence/IMEI validator, and other things they may not want to have been public, and later things this strange little "community" was asking them for occasionally. By time they were facing shutting it down, they weren't quite sure what was on there, but they knew they "owned" it, and could shut it off at will.

The idea of making everything FOSS was a no-go from the start. We did ask. Nobody wants to sign a document saying "all the stuff in this box is free" without knowing how to look through the box or evaluate what any of it is.

The "safer" alternative was to sign over the rights to a group that would be legally responsible for it. That limits their legal liability to some degree. But there were a few items where that wasn't the case. In particular they knew (from the EULA) there were 3rd party blobs in the device images where they had specific contractual obligations. So those were explicitly called out and denied in the transference documents. Again, we fought to include them, but there was no budging.

So tell me: Which would you rather have? A legal entity that holds the rights to oversee the parts we have left, or the site shut down almost 2 years ago? Those really were the only choices.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

It's utterly useless to argue with somebody who thinks IP can get defined based on a fuzzy "we paid for IT, so IT is ours", when the one stating this has no faintest clue what "IT" actually consists of. I explained to elaborate length which makes your ears bleed that "IT" right now (to my knowledge) has nothing Nokia produced and didn't instantly put under CC licnse and thus Nokia can not claim ownership in it. The "skin" is not patentable or potectable by any copyright, neither is the theme, and the logos are even explicitly published under CC (see previous post) - nobody can stop me from creating exactly same site from scratch right away, by copying all the publicly available content and scripts from SVN. And nobody can sue me when I do so, since nothing in all this *) is protected under any licence (except CC and GPL).
Which basically is what techstaff did - and I'll do again since this site and servers are obviously squatted by owners that have no clue.

*)any blobs of third parties or whatever are not available from *.maemo.org. Period. And nobody *can* shut down this site, since there for sure are a dozen mirrors already (consisting of 100% FOSS/CC content) which would run exactly what we got/need from maemo.org, just under a different URL (since the URL actually is owned by Nokia. Heck maybe we even had to use sed -i 's/maemo/meamo/ `find / `, wouldn't kill us, just annoying)

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

And this is the exact scenario that caused my resignation. When I was unable to trust (root of the word "trustee") that acts being carried out were legal. So, not as bizarre a scenario as you may think, having already happened here.

Re: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
 

As noted by Wikiwide: Actions that may seem legal, or may even be legal in and of themselves, can still land those in charge in a pot of mess.

Lets assume someone made a new program, based on an existing GPL source code (since that's been the rave to talk about of late). We both know that since it's GPL, it's all fine to post, right? But if Apple claims there's some patent infringement, who decides if that should stay or not? The community? The BoD? TechStaff? And if they come after us for damages, which will easily dwarf the pittance we have in the bank, who gets stuck with that?

Legality isn't always the shield one would hope it is. In a perfect world, where attorneys are paid for by the government, and are as effective and efficient as the ones large companies can afford to pay for, maybe. But that's not the world I live in. And I frankly doubt there is such a place where we could start our company and have that blessing.


Agreed, but again, it's not just a matter of illegal activity. And even then, stopping the activity doesn't mean there won't be challenges in the social arena. Especially when one is railing "it's all FOSS", while the other is looking at case law that indicates the odds of spending time in jail are high, even if one has a German screaming "it's all FOSS" in the courtroom during trial... :rolleyes:

That is also true. Though I do see the need for Council diminishing with the size of the community. Frankly, with the levels of participation right now (via recent polls, elections, and even site visit stats), the need for a focusing group to channel those voices into 3 or 5 is less needed. When we were thousands, or even hundreds, it was needed. The last vote total was what, 83? Do we really need 5 people to "focus" that small a group?