Ignoring the rest of your post for the moment (which seems to have gone slightly off the reality wagon), Nokia sell devices. Mer uses lots of Maemo open source components.

Why would Mer reusing Nokia-shipped closed-source binaries for N8x0 releases "destroy them", or be a viable competitor to Maemo 5?

This is -me- asking, what we need to put our focus into looking at trying to make work in Mer. All Nokia has asked for, is a list... Why we're asking for reasoning, is to make it possible to prioritize our time in determining where it's even worth spending time on trying to integrating the closed source bits.

Dude. I was trying to be funny in that last bit. If you were to ignore anything in that post, it would be the last bit where I was being silly.

Of those, Flash is the only one that needs additional closed components.

There are ways to handle the Operator Wizard's role (possibly even ones that aren't broken by default, and can have their database updated when a problem is found with it)

several open-source handwriting input methods, and IIRC xvkbd can do completion, so the code's out there.

And unless I'm mistaken, Mer already includes (i.e., steals from existing Maemo install) bme.

You didn't mention it, but I'd put Skype with Flash; those are the two things I can see that have substantial impact on end-users and don't have plausible replacement paths.

As interim components until we get some of those worked out, I'm not averse to other things, but I don't see them as very important.

OK, I really have to defuse this one, sorry This is -me- asking, what we need to put our focus into looking at trying to make work in Mer. All Nokia has asked for, is a list[1]. No justifications, just what we think would be useful and what we would want to distribute, and to isolate early on as possible to see what would be possible to distribute, both of Nokia applications and 3rd party code.

They are doing us a huge favour through this opening, - allowing Mer on tablets to accelerate to Fremantle-level functionality so when Fremantle (and RX-51) comes out, N8x0(W) (and maybe even 770) will have quite similar functionality.

Why we're asking for reasoning, is to make it possible to prioritize our time in determining where it's even worth spending time on trying to integrating the closed source bits.



Yes, we are. The closed bits stuff is added value to make it a more viable backport of Fremantle functionality, so people doesn't have to sacrifice functionality of their tablets. For my sake I could live with HW interfacing closed source bits, but some people are more picky



The open source replacements question is to make us aware what things people would agree on would be good to include in base firmware images, or things that could be useful to spend time on integrating, - to see what people want and what they can live without.

Why are we being asked to justify every closed-source component?

I would think it would be a more simple case than that; can we have the closed source bits for Mer? Yes? Thanks!

It seems weird that Nokia is saying, "Yes, you can have closed source bits, but you have to work for it; you have to justify each one -- why do you need that one? And why do you need that one? Are you really, really sure you need that one? Show me how much you want it. Oh, come on, you can live without that one."

Supposedly, Adobe is in alpha/beta stages with flash for ARM V6 and V7 with an estimated release of this summer. I realize it will still be closed source, but it would at least be freely downloadable without the Nokia middleman at that point.

and if someone would like to steal functioning 3D video drivers which Nokia doesn't even seem to have that would be nice too.

Well, Nokia have something approaching them. They just can't release them. And steal them from whom, exactly?

We asked the Mer team to list the *3rd party* closed source packages they need, since they don't belong to Nokia and therefore we need to make sure the owners are fine with the deal... This is more or less what we have already said about the closed source components owned by Nokia:

We don't see any problem with the idea of redistributing Nokia owned
software to owners of Nokia devices, and the question to be decided is only the best way to do it.

Nokia has never said anything like that.