[maemo-developers] Projects Nokia should support (yours?)

[From: Neil Jerram]

I sense two fundamental problems here.

1. You (Quim) are looking for applications that will help
differentiate the next Internet Tablet.  But differentiation is
contrary to the interests of the majority of the community.

2. The timescale is too short.  Either people already have most of
their time committed for the next few months, or they don't.  I would
venture that those with time on their hands are mostly unlikely to be
people who could pull a project together in this timescale, and to the
quality that you are looking for.

(2) is self-explanatory.  To expand on (1) a bit...  My time for free
software is limited, and the best outcome for me is if I can use that
time to write something once, and then have it automagically show up
and run on the widest possible set of devices: my computer, internet
tablet, phone, and so on.

(Note that "writing" here includes activities like packaging.  In an
ideal world, I would only have to package each new version of my
software once, upload the source package to Debian, and everything
else would follow from that.  Note that this has now been achieved for
the Openmoko phone, so it is entirely possible.)

So, for me, anything that requires me to "port", or to do something
differently for the Nokia tablets, is a negative.  A couple of
specific examples are

- the /var/lib/install thing in the first 770 OS ... thankfully now long gone

- the existence of hildon.

And so here are a couple of project ideas.

1. Work on a Gtk+ theme, and changes if needed to the upstream Gtk+
project, so that any existing Gtk+ app will run (without any porting)
on the tablet and look as good as hildonized apps do today.

2. Organize the system so that the Debian arm repository can be used as is.

If you did that, there would be 100s of existing apps that would run
and look good - which for me would be a far more powerful selling
point than one or two specific applications written specifically for
the tablet.

I hope that's useful.  I appreciate it will probably come across as an
extreme viewpoint, and perhaps I should spend more time before sending
to try to develop a more reasonable intermediate proposal - but I
don't have time for that right now.

Best wishes,
     Neil