[maemo-community] Maemo Elections - Extended

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Wednesday 04 April 2012 14:40:42 Felipe Crochik wrote:
> I have never left! Have to say that for personal reasons haven't been as
> involved as before but I am still here!

Many of us are still around as users, even if we are no longer doing active 
development on Maemo.  But we are grateful to those who are still doing 
development!

> Not sure if it makes any sense to try this now or if it is better to wait
> after the election but hopefully we can start to gather all "the community
> issues/desires/hopes and dreams" into a document so we can discuss have a
> public discussion with Quim and hopefully decide on some action items. I
> believe we need a community proposal. 

I am still mostly of the same opinion as I was 6 months ago: the forum, wiki 
and mailing lists are the most important community resource but are not really 
under threat (even if the money went away tomorrow, volunteers would be found 
to host those).  

The repositories are harder: they are a very important resource and it would 
be a great shame if they went away and people had to maintain their own 
private repositories.  However, they are relatively expensive (bandwidth, 
space and the software necessary to make them work).

Given the current levels of development, I would favour getting rid of the 
autobuilders and the testing and promotion process.  Allow the few remaining 
active developers to make their own builds and to decide for themselves when 
to push their various releases into the various repositories.

If we assume that Nokia support will eventually go away, our efforts should be 
focused on getting Nokia to (i) grant the community a perpetual licence to 
distrubute the Nokia proprietary material necessary to continue development (I 
am thinking mainly of software, SDK, etc but the task would have to include 
drawing up the inventory), and (ii) give us the web server code used to 
maintain the repositories (in the reduced form I describe above) so we can 
keep it running.

If others agree with this approach then we need a council of do-ers, who will 
take on organising getting these tasks done and working with Quim.  Not 
philosophers or ideas people who do not have time to put the necessary effort 
in.  That is why I am not standing!

Graham