[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] RE: Nokia 770 sources...

[From: Andrew Barr]

On Mon, 2006-08-28 at 18:47 -0300, Alessandro Ikeuchi wrote:
> ...

While I certainly don't agree with the angry tone used, I have to say
Maemo and the Nokia 770 have been disappointing in terms of openness. It
seems to me that Nokia has opened just enough to get apps ported and/or
written for the device, which in turn sells more devices, or at least
that appears to be the plan. Nothing has come of recurring requests for
information about the Bluetooth hardware (e.g. for headset support), Ogg
Vorbis support, or Gstreamer/DSP multimedia internals in general. Some
things that are missing from the Subversion repo don't even make sense,
e.g. there is no hardware secrets or patents associated with them (at
least as far as I know) The media player apps come to mind here.

Maemo really isn't open in the sense that we're used to: like a
traditional Linux distribution. It seems to be more of an SDK plus
things that were required to be open, e.g. due to licensing terms. 

This is unfortunate, because it creates a burden on the Nokia employees
working on this project. They are the only ones who can add many
requested features or fix bugs, so in many cases people complain to the
mail list because they cannot take care of things themselves. You don't
see patch mails on the maemo-* lists. That's to say nothing of ideas
people have had but been unable to implement--trivial stuff that would
improve the Maemo environment but may not have been discussed on the ML.

To me, the open-source economy (or whatever) that makes some projects so
great doesn't work here because the "community" is relegated in large
part to the role of application developer. The best you can do to
improve some parts of Maemo is suggest it and hope someone at Nokia
takes it up.

These are just my impressions from informal observation and occasional
participation in this endeavor. If you think I'm way off base or crazy
or something, please feel free to tell me or ignore me.
-- 
Andrew Barr | http://www.oakcourt.dyndns.org/~andrew/

"Buzzword detected (core dumped)"
  -- seen on linux-kernel at vger.kernel.org