[maemo-community] Election announcement article (formatting & questions)

[From: Craig Woodward]

---- Andrew Flegg <andrew at bleb.org> wrote: 
>If you're doubting Graham's bona fides as a developer, I have to ask
>how long *you*'ve been in the Maemo community. I read the thread you
>linked to and I'm sorry to say my impression was the same as Graham's.

Sorry, but not all of us have had the "privilege" of being here and active on this forum and mailing list since the dawn of tablets.  Expecting everyone to know someone, and revere them when they're being rude is just one problem this whole "community" has had for a while now.  Sorry, but if you walk away from something (a job, a marriage, or a community), you don't get to come back months or years later and bad-mouth people and expect reverence.  You shouldn't expect it even when you ARE active if you're being rude.  Anyone who has to ask "Do you know who I am?" needs to be replied to with "A pompous self-aggrandizing windbag?" every once in a while.

Even "noobs" (in this community and programmers in general) know it's not always a simple task to pick up complex programs from others.  Anyone following the forums in the past year, and seeing the hurdles it's taken to get garage ownership moved (Pali with power-kernel, for example), would know it's not a trivial thing to do.  So yes, someone suggesting both things are simple, or that developers have infinite time to do these things, I view with some degree of speculation.  Especially when they've not been active to my knowledge in the past couple years, and are saying such things while talking down to others and bad-mouthing the community at large with comments like "I'm glad I stopped reading the forums".

>Are there other examples/smoking guns? I assume you're *not*
>suggesting that there's a great global conspiracy, but instead people
>advocating a similar platform for those looking for a transition?

There are plenty, but then I wasn't bookmarking every time I saw it to document it for a later argument I wasn't planning on having in the first place.  I'm sure if you look through the complaint logs they'd be easy to spot from the high report rate.  For that matter, a good number of the worst comments have probably been moderated or self-edited out of existence.  So to some extent, you're asking me to prove a point after some of the evedence has been removed.  

No, it's not a global conspiracy.  It's been a small handful of people doing it for the most part, and some of them have even been suspended or banned.  But they're a very vocal minority, and have been stirring up the debate; advocating for Maemo to go away in preference of their own platform.

Again... Understand my motivation here. I'm not trying to get people "banned" or strung up or anything.  I'm not here to argue a point, or convince you in some way that I'm special or right about everything going on.  My goal in even replying (with 3 sentences) was to corroborate that this HAS been happening in the forum.  To provide another data point so that people here that may have not been reading the forums would know there IS a small but active bunch out there pushing this agenda.

I'm half sad I even bothered to do that much, since all I got for it was people rudely putting me down and implying I was in some way a dolt for not providing a smoking gun, or "knowing" how "easy" it is to take over projects from developers as they leave.  With attitudes like this, is it any wonder people drop the mailing list and consider it irrelevant?  I'm debating doing the same, as it seems to have all the worst qualities of the forums without any of the positives.

>Have you got a better idea? 

Wow... Could you be more condescending?

There have been several ideas floated, by several people.  But that's been in the forums, which apparently nobody reads any more, so I guess they're all worthless ideas anyway.

The one I most advocate is setting up a self-funding system (option 1 from "your" list).  I also like the idea of merging the project/repositories/forums into an existing NFP like Debian.org.  Weather or not we need to form our own _personal_ NFP or not isn't something I've taken time to consider.  There are enough out there that provide umbrella status that it's probably just as easy to get under one of them.  But I haven't shot the argument down for out own yet, since I haven't had time to hear why others seem to think it would be important for us to form our own.

>The options as I see them aren't mutually exclusive:

Agreed.  My concern was that a vocal minority (given historic low voter turn out) may be able to remove one of those options from the table, either by vote or by arguing out the clock until there's not enough time to choose one of the options.  That threat, I think, is still out there.




As for your side note on Cordia:

Cordia and N9 seem to have a foot in both worlds.  Like many such hybrids I suspect they'll be ill received in both communities, which is a shame.  Both look like nice devices and/or projects. I'd really prefer a middle-ground between them though.  The N9 is functional, with a polished UI and is "end user ready", but seems a bit restrictive because of overly closed bits (much like the N900).  The Cordia looks a little too reliant on "the community" to get basic functionality in place (much like OpenMoko).  Ideally I'd prefer a system with an open but stable base, and enough of a minimal UI to practically use that base functionality.  If it can make/answer calls, connect to wifi, charge the battery, and have a simple X-based open desktop with big icons, that's perfect.  It just seems every device out there hits a plateau just shy of that point.  It either has tons of features, eye-candy, and is crippled by closed-sourced road-blocks, or can't reliably do basic things like make calls or connect to wifi reliably.  The N900 had a sprinkling of both, while OpenMoko fell sharply in the later camp.