[maemo-developers] Corporate ownership of open source projects [LWN]

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 7:31 PM, Kees Jongenburger
<kees.jongenburger at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Andrew, I found your post very interesting.

Thank you :-)

>  The moost apealing idea I find is the community maintained hackkers edition.
>  did the maemo people do anything wrong in that aspect?

I think so. For example:

  * The development was done by a Nokia employee.
  * The tools, sources and components he had access to were not (easily)
    available to the community.
  * AFAIK, most of the work was done in work hours, with no open discussion
    or collaboration. There were no posts to maemo-developers discussing
    the project, how it was going, the issues faced.
  * It was ultimately thrown over the wall, with comments then coming along
    the lines of "it'd be good if the community could maintain future versions
    of this", without any information on how it'd been maintained to date.

>  I don't really see what there is to learn from what SUN is doing. What
>  I see is a platform that has grown and that I would call mature and perhaps a
>  little borring?

Oh, I wasn't suggesting there was anything really to learn from the
Sun case, just that the complaints in the OpenSolaris developer
community seemed to strike a chord with the problems voiced by the
maemo developer community.

I wonder if "mature" is the right way to describe the maemo platform.
>From the outside, to a more cynical observer, a more pejorative
description might be "stagnant" :-(

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org | http://www.bleb.org/