[maemo-developers] No more 770 bug activity?

[From: Quim Gil]

Hi there, let's see if we can canalize all this energy in one or more
useful directions.

Each of the following points belongs to one channel of discussion. My
feeling is that mixing channels (as we are doing in this thread) won't
help getting to any conclusion, since each issue is enough complex per
se. 


About support

That blog post from Ari. If you read it through you will see that what
was explained on January 11 is what has happened already today. "Nokia
supports it fully" means at least that the End-User Software Agreement
is still valid and Nokia 770 customers can make use of all their rights,
same as before the N800 and the IT OS 20907 were launched. Is a 770 bug
crashing your device and making it unusable? Nokia support will find a
solution. Is a newly found security hole putting in risk your data or
privacy? in this case we should also respond.

Does Support *also* mean to keep providing software updates and normal
bug fixes through regular and also officially supported releases? This
is the question now. This extended support was not planned for the 770
but as said is being considered and defined for the N800 (you will know
when we have something decided). 

It's understandable that users of commercial and technically
consolidated desktops/laptops expect this extended support to be
default. The problem is that the Internet Tablets, and the 770
specially, sit in a very different context that makes fairly uneasy to
fulfill these expectations. 


About bugs & functionality

Bugs are important, but what is really important is functionality.
Having nnn 770-related bugs open doesn't tell much. Real use cases of
things not working as expected tell a lot. 

This also has a huge impact on the resources and the plan for keeping
770 customers happy. Keeping in sync the current developments with the
770 hardware & software architectures for every single package might be
a task too big and expensive to be pushed by anybody. Instead, if we
have identified a bunch of critical factors that stop 770 customers
being happy with their devices, the steps to solve that might be easier.

As an example, the bug that started this thread is about visual effects
of the Marbles game. Right, it is indeed a bug, but...

Packages are just a tool to get functionality in place. A list of
changed packages is useful, but a list of use cases to take care of
(even better, with priority levels) would be even more useful. Then we
see which are the critical packages attached to those use cases, and who
can take care of what.


About openness

The maemo and IT OS versions that have been developed for the 770 (and
the N800) reflect the degree of openness that has been feasible within
the context, schedules and resources available for these projects. Yes,
there has been also this discussion about how open all this should be,
but a big weight of the decisions have been carried by project
management decisions. People used to community driven free software
development need to understand (I'm still learning at it) how different
the picture is when you develop inside a corporation and together with a
hardware production process.

Many closed packages are a result of this, and even if it doesn't make
much sense to have them closed exclusively from a community point of
view, opening them is not that simple here. 

The result of this is the current open application development platform
tied to a platform less open itself. We know that. We want to move
forward. We *are* moving forward. More details as soon as we have a plan
that makes sense, in the meantime you can follow pieces of this plan
like Sardine, the processes for getting aligned with upstream projects,
scalability, hardware detachment, public roadmap, official projects
brought to Garage, etc.


To those thinking that emails like this one belong to the category of
non-answers: you are in your right of thinking this way and I won't
argue that. They are answers though, and quite real, taking into account
most of the pieces that make this complex game work.

-- 
Quim Gil - http://maemo.org