[maemo-community] Maemo Meeting Minutes 26 March 2011, 1400 UTC...

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On Mar 29, 2011, at 12:35, Andrew Flegg wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 11:22, Jeremiah Foster
> <jeremiah at jeremiahfoster.com> wrote:
>> 
>> The basic point is Nokia is not going to keep Maemo.org on life support
>> much longer. What happens to all the software? It can find a home
>> in Debian where there are people who will look after it and develop it.
> 
> To clarify, because this is important, this very much depends on your
> value of "much [longer]". See the meeting log for more details, but
> short version:
> 
>  * At least 12 months
>  * For the foreseeable future
> 
> However, if the Debian Project were willing to provide autobuilders,
> web space and support in the event Nokia's funding was to be
> withdrawn, I'm sure that'd be great.

Thanks Andrew, I'm glad you clarified because I was being purposefully vague.

I'm also glad to hear Nokia is going to support Maemo for at least a little while longer, they really ought to keep the GPL sources available for five years after distribution however, it might be a GPL violation if they decide to shut down the repos completely within five years of the last release of a product with GPL sources. Nokia will want to look at their obligations under the GPL closely before they wind the maemo.org web site down.

Debian of course uses a set of autobuilders which anyone is free to use, even to clone and use locally if they wish, but they are different from the Nokia autobuilder. I suspect they are not significantly different but rather add Nokia blobs and other secret sauce but I've not looked at the source code for the Nokia autobiulders. Debian also already offers a resource like the maemo.org garage called Alioth. Alioth is one of Debian's servers and hosts a version of source forge (I guess its called "fusion forge" now), so developers can move or start new projects there, you don't have to be a DD to use it either.

Regards,

Jeremiah