[maemo-community] Proposal for community firmware images

[From: Carsten Valdemar Munk]

Hey all,

As part of the community efforts to backport Fremantle components  
(Mer), there have been discussions on how the community can provide  
firmware images containing proprietary contents (nokia software,  
hardware firmware blobs, 3rd party?, etc.) and distribute these. I've  
posted to this mailing list to invite more input from the Maemo  
Community on how to deal with this problem.

A proposal to deal with this problem could be to, allow/license/etc  
maemo.org, directed by the Maemo Community Council, elected by the  
Maemo Community, to do the following:

* On their servers construct, based on build scripts provided by  
community developers, firmware images (FIASCO images, jffs images,  
etc.) containing the proprietary contents.

* The resulting images will then be provided by the maemo.org servers.

The resulting firmware images would only be downloadable through  
providing a valid MAC address for a Nokia Internet Tablet product and  
agreeing to a license covering the user's use of the firmware image,  
just like tablets-dev.nokia.com.

The effect of this could be, through the maemo.org process, that the  
community could be able to remix the firmware images, backport  
Fremantle components without having to directly deal with licensing  
and could make it possible to provide alternative distributions for  
the tablets without them sacrificing
hardware interfaces, etc.

/Carsten V. Munk