[maemo-developers] No more 770 bug activity?

[From: Neil Jerram]

Kimmo Hämäläinen <kimmo.hamalainen at nokia.com> writes:

> On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 17:54 -0400, ext Andrew J. Barr wrote:
> ...
>> Also stuff like ke-recv, I suspect is an attempt, probably by TI or some
>> other third party, to obfuscate some so-called "intellectual property"
>> that would normally go into a kernel driver. Something along the lines
>> of the ipw3945d that existed for a while.
>
> :D  No, it's quite simple piece of code. It could be open-source in the
> future (I have suggested it and it seems wheels are turning). It handles
> automounting of memory cards, updates bunch of GConf keys, and sends
> some D-Bus signals (background killing and low-memory), according to
> certain HW events. Btw. I wrote it, so TI is not involved (unless they
> have planted ideas to my brain while I was asleep).
>
> BR, Kimmo

So this is a very interesting example, then.  This is a component
that apparently doesn't incorporate any pre-existing code with a
tricky license, is not complex enough to have "intellectual property"
that Nokia might want to protect, and was written by a
free-software-friendly person (yourself!).

So why on earth was it ever closed-source?

I wonder similarly about things such as the Media Player UI and the
metalayer-crawler.  There's no rocket science there, so why are these
components closed?

Regards,
      Neil