[maemo-community] Extras and Fremantle

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On Mar 4, 2009, at 3:04 AM, Ryan Abel wrote:

> On Mar 3, 2009, at 5:31 PM, Jeremiah Foster wrote:
>
>> Who maintains them, Nokia or maemo.org?
>
> I think this is going to be the biggest stumbling block for us, and
> it's gotta be both. We just don't have enough people involved to
> support a big, complicated repository setup with lots of involved QA
> requirements. We have maybe a dozen people who are involved at varying
> levels of activity capable of really working on this software around
> Extras, among those people there is exactly one who is in a full-time
> position who has a primary requirement that involves the repository,
> and maybe another three or four people who are in paid positions and
> that also have responsibilities that encompass the repository.

You're right this is a big job.

> In order to really see this thing through we're going to need either a
> major influx of support from volunteers in the community (my
> prediction is that it'll help, but it's not gonna be big enough), or
> some more active support Nokia-side (after all, this _is_ the
> repository that'll end up reflecting quite strongly on their product).
> We want to come out the other side with a really great setup
> (hopefully in in the Fremantle timeframe), and we can't pull that off
> if it's just going to be a community-only solution. We _need_ Nokia's
> support here if we want to succeed. Both because we can't have afford
> to have them out of the loop, and because we need the extra support.

Here I am not so sure. One has to remember that debian does all of  
this completely through volunteers. So it is possible that maemo can  
do this through volunteers as well. I realize that Nokia has a lot  
riding on this, and is concerned about the user experience and  
therefor should want functioning repos. But Nokia should also want a  
strong community around their products.

Free Software has to be a compelling alternative to closed models for  
business. We need to demonstrate that the bazaar produces software of  
higher quality, is quicker to market, and costs significantly less  
that the traditional proprietary development model.

The repos are full of community software - they should be maintained  
by the community. That might be hard to do, but we need to find a way  
to do that.

Jeremiah