[maemo-community] Banners on maemo.org

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On May 16, 2011, at 20:05, Attila Csipa wrote:

> On Monday 16 May 2011 15:20:39 you wrote:
>> It also needs to
>> return changes back from Maemo to Debian to be in compliance with the GPL.
>> There is a project for this called "DEX" and I strongly advise the council
>> and all members of Maemo to look into it and participate. This project was
>> created explicitly for Debian derivatives like Maemo. Canonical's CTO is
>> actively moving patches from Ubuntu back to Debian through DEX. Maemo
>> should do this too.
> 
> Just to clarify things - the Council is about maemo.org and the community 
> built around it. It does not own or distribute Maemo (the OS), which was and 
> is under the Nokia umbrella - and we definitely want to see as much of Maemo 
> open and public as possible, even if with arguable outcome on that front. We 
> also support and respect related distributions like Debian and want to keep 
> the CSSU completely open and in full compliance with the GPL. It's another 
> matter that most of these updates make little sense to upstream - they are 
> mostly Maemo/mobile specific or are upstream to Debian itself. Another problem 
> is that even with the open parts of Maemo, the maintainers are often Nokians 
> who have moved on, so we have a bunch of patches/diffs that we will have a hard 
> time explaining and rationalizing if we submit them to Debian. Don't get me 
> wrong, personally I really wish to cooperate with Debian as much possible, but 
> it's no trivial task and we're sadly way too short on manpower, so the only 
> way I see serious movement there is for people to step up - and I believe they 
> will have the Council's support for that.

This is an excellent summary of the challenges placed upon Maemo and the Maemo council. By focusing on banners I may have minimized the other important work the council does and I do not want to do that. I think the council has taken on a lot of responsibility and should be commended for their hard work as Maemo moves from a Nokia project to a community project.

Regards,

Jeremaih