momcilo | # 281 | 2011-05-30, 14:13 | Report

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

Stskeeps | # 282 | 2011-05-30, 14:16 | Report

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.

abill_uk | # 283 | 2011-05-30, 14:34 | Report

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 !.

momcilo | # 284 | 2011-05-30, 14:35 | Report

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

Daneel | # 285 | 2011-05-30, 14:50 | Report

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.

Stskeeps | # 286 | 2011-05-30, 15:00 | Report

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.

Stskeeps | # 287 | 2011-05-30, 15:04 | Report

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.

momcilo | # 288 | 2011-05-30, 15:06 | Report

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?

joerg_rw | # 289 | 2011-05-30, 15:10 | Report

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

momcilo | # 290 | 2011-05-30, 15:11 | Report

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.