presuming that this form of funding would succeed, who would be doing the actual work? I know the end user portion (the majority) of the community likes to hear this kind of ideas but just by collecting money will not magically start making thing happen. The community would need more people doing something else than just talking (hackers, developers, etc.). I just don't see those kind of people enough around here anymore and do not believe that the situation will get any better. Feel free to prove me wrong (by doing instead of talking and bikeshedding)
I'd be willing to donate towards a charitable project that used N9x0s and the accompanying software for some kind of social endeavour - better communications in off-grid villages, for instance. What I'd donate for is to subsidise a production run of suitable hardware, without which Maemo will become irrelevant.
Even if it were possible, there's no point developing the OS in a vacuum and you'd need a helluva lot of $10 donations to pay one developer. What I wish would happen is that people and companies would do what they are good at:
Nokia is still the hardware manufacturer I have faith in (in spite of the USB issues) - if they could produce a few hundred N950s, I'd buy one even with Maemo 5 just as it stands. What they don't seem to know squat about is operating systems - and let's face it, it's hardly their area of expertise.
Canonical has to be the market leader in "taking Linux to the masses".... I've been through Slackware, Redhat, Mandrake, gentoo, debian, but, love it or hate it, Ubuntu is the first Linux OS I can give to an uninitiated Windoze user and hear some of them tell me they haven't booted XP for a month. I'll take their approach to usability over Apple's, any day, and if Maemo becomes an orphan, then I'd like to see it under their wing. They can provide the experts with more than a $10 donation, too.
ASUS shouldn't be forgotten for their EEEpc concept, admittedly it took them a few goes to add 3G, but, I can see them being better placed to have a foray into these devices than most of the mobile phone manufacturers.
It's been the cellular networks who sell, subsidise and market mobile phones, and that made sense when you were talking about a Nokia 5110 that had no other purpose and you could sustain a contract model. But, Vodafone are notorious for shooting themselves in the foot with custom firmware (a bad joke) that they then don't update or bugfix; their "support" for these devices is non-existent and the non-enthusiast users are driven away. As more mobile networks offer a simple contract for the services they supply, more decent hardware is readily available through sites like eBay, and it becomes more normal for consumers to provide their own hardware, it won't seem odd to buy your mobile computer from an IT firm, and your service from the network.
So, no, Maemo in a vacuum, I wouldn't buy or donate money to, even if I just bought a spare piece of hardware to run it on. I'll donate time, so far as I'm able, but I've paid for the device and its software several times over. Now, show me a piece of more universal hardware that can run Maemo or any other ARM Linux, and currently, Maemo would be a strong contender. Until someone implements its truly open source replacement, that is...
I can make a suggestion here too..... IF enough people will donate then the best person to approach in the beggining when you got money in your pocket so to speak is stskeeps, HE has the code and also the knowledge AND can pull the team needed to do this BUT you got a very tricky situation on your hands.
I would like to donate developer rmoravcik(for now) because both apps that he made were really usefull for me. Also I would like to donate other developers that were contributing Maemo with their hearts and minds.
