[maemo-developers] [maemo-users] RE: [maemo-developers] Future features for Maemo Desktop

[From: Kalle Vahlman]

2006/8/29, Eero Tamminen <eero.tamminen at movial.fi>:
> Hi,
>
> > "There are plenty of other small differences, *some* of which are
> > explained in this tutorial." (my emphasis). Now the only way to
> > change that *some* into an *all* is to give us (the community)
> > either easy access to the source code (best)
>
> But you do have!  Just click the "LXR" link on the left of the tutorial
> page.  The Hildon framework sources are publicly available (and have been
> for a long time).

Unfortunately when people say "sources for 770" they do tend to mean
IT200x (the product) too and not only Maemo (the platform).

I think there was not enough separation made between the two (not that
the difference would be that obvious though) in the initial launch,
which lead to different expectations than what came to reality. This
coupled to the fact that the original release for the sources was
sluggish made for disappointments in the open source community that,
quite frankly, isn't that sensitive to the issues that the so-called
"corporate people" have.

So while the initial marriage of open source and "corporate"[1] wasn't
too smooth all around, to my eye it is definitely developing in the
right direction and has come a long way from where it began. Having
met some of the nice people doing this work and thinking on how to
improve it (hi tigert :) I'm sure it will get better all the time.

Now, it would be crucial to get some community work integrated to the
product too so that people will see how their input is valuable and
welcome. One way of doing this would be to organise a hackfest during
which there would be some features developed and bugs fixed by the
community with the support of Maemo-staff. I'm not sure how well
patches from the maemo.org bugzilla have been received, I remember
hearing of maybe one patch that has been applied (but there must be
others, right?). Getting the component maintainers to hang out in IRC
reviewing community patches as a dedicated effort would definitely
help on bridging the gap between the two worlds in my opinion. Who
knows if such a thing would make the maemo developers receive not only
complaints but fixes too ;)


[1] I'm only using this word as I'm not sure what would be a better
one. "commercial" is not what I mean here, but rather the goals and
work flow differences.

-- 
Kalle Vahlman, zuh at iki.fi
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