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

[From: Andrew Barr]

On 8/29/06, Devesh Kothari <devesh.kothari at nokia.com> wrote:

> Now what we are concentrating on, beside improving the above is to
> enable participation and contribution in stages to different parts of
> maemo, starting with HAF/Sardine which I hope would extend. The starting
> up and adoption barrier for sardine are being recognized, and we are now
> trying to make it easy to adopt and use sardine, without sacrificing the
> genral device usability. This would enable the patches or feature
> implementations by community to be made and tested on the latest svn
> codebase, so the component owners can integrate/accept/reject them.
> There has been excellent work done for enabling dual boot by Frantisek Dufka
> http://maemo.org/maemowiki/BootMenu

Sardine certainly looks like a step in the right direction in terms of
integrating the community into the development process, kind of like
Red Hat does with its Fedora Project. Nokia, like Red Hat, has a
shipping product that it needs some degree of control over, but also
an active community that has its own ideas and wishes. Hopefully
Sardine will help make the Maemo project better and keep both Nokia
and the Maemo community happy. Ideally, in the future there could be
complete, unofficial "product images" (as Nokia calls them) that are
created by the community, for example maybe one that incorporates only
free software (in the GNU or OSI sense). Maybe something similar to
Red Hat's derivative policy towards Fedora. That would be a
particularly popular one among some, I would venture. Similar to
OpenZaurus for the Sharp PDAs, but within the auspices of the Maemo
community.

Unaddressed so far, however, is the Bluetooth headset issue--more
generally, hardware details that are necessary to create such a
distribution. Headset support would be an extremely useful feature,
one that I would like myself, but unfortunately no one outside Nokia
(or TI or whoever made the Bluetooth chip) has the necessary details.
This is an area where the current top-down structure of the Maemo
project fails. You (the Nokia engineers) seem genuinely interested in
listening to the community, I would be willing to bet that either
adding the necessary support to the the Maemo kernel or providing
documentation to interested parties would silence a longstanding gripe
of some of us.

(Just a personal gripe of mine: Proper monitor mode support in the
WLAN driver so Kismet will run correctly. The Nokia 770 is by far the
most perfect device to run Kismet on that I have ever seen--it's a
shame it doesn't work right. :) )