[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Too busy to accept help?

[From: Carlos Guerreiro]

ext koos vriezen wrote:
> 2006/10/21, Carlos Guerreiro <carlos.guerreiro at nokia.com>:
>> ext Murray Cumming wrote:
>> > I'm not seeing any significant improvement to this situation, and
>> > Nokia's developers seem no less busy. So I'm still wasting time 
>> chasing
>> > incredibly minor patches.
>> >
>> > I still think a dedicated empowered community liason would fix this.
>> >
>> Murray, you have suggested this before and we have taken notice. At some
>> point
>> that would most probably improve things and it might very well happen.
>> However, at
>> this point our difficulties mainly stem from internal development
>> processes that are
>> not well good at enabling community platform development.
>
> I don't fully agree with this, Nokia isn't doing so bad IMO. First the
> $99 campaign was a smart move to start up a community. The maemo.org
> and garage are great infrastructures for developers. Scratchbox simply
> rocks IMHO. And @nokia.com is often one of the answering ones on this
> list.
Certainly. All of this is great infrastructure for _application_ 
developers.
That's the original focus of Maemo, to provide a good platform for 
_application_
development on the 770.

My understanding of Murray's frustration is that it is mainly about the 
difficulty of
doing  _platform_ development, meaning contributing to Maemo itself, not 
simply
building  on top of Maemo.
It is hardly surprising that community platform development has been so 
difficult
given that was not originally a goal for Maemo. Sure, the platform is 
open, the source code
is available and we've tried to enable tinkering with it as much as 
possible since having an
open platform helps and encourages application development and hey, 
contributions to the
platform wouldn't hurt.
But we (Nokia) didn't prepare ourselves or Maemo for developing Maemo 
itself openly with
the community, In terms of infrastructure, processes and even mindset. 
That's why Murray
and others find it so hard to contribute.

Recently we have selected the HAF as the playground for experimenting 
with community
platform development. Why the HAF? Mostly because it contains many of 
the open-source
components originated by Nokia (e.g.: maemo-af-desktop). Those are the 
ones that would benefit
the most from attracting a community of developers. So it's the HAF 
software and the HAF
team that are the primary focus of process and infrastructure adjustments.

> May I humbly suggest that not only the haf is important, but also the
> community applications may need some more attention. New releases from
> Nokia almost looks like calling processEvents() on the community, apps
> update/improve suddenly faster. Someone that pushes the community
> other ways may do this also.
>
That's true, point taken.

Br,
Carlos