[maemo-developers] ... and QA of closed source applications?

[From: Attila Csipa]

On Wednesday 06 May 2009 12:33:21 Henrik Hedberg wrote:
>     This is a very important question, and even if some members of the
> maemo.org community may be hard core open source software enthusiastic
> using only free software in their devices, the reality is that there are
> even more opportunities to get very good software for the devices if we
> allow also non-free software to be a part of our community supported
> extras repository.

I think one of the key issues is not if it is possible to install non-free 
software, but rather to be in the clear that people *know* which software is, 
and which isn't free and then decide for themselves if they want it or not. 
In the spirit of recalling the history of the wheel, I'll mention the Debian 
and Ubuntu families solve this by putting them in a separate repository (just 
as available as the free ones). Since we already have a nokia/extras split, 
this could be just as extension to that.

In the same vein, Ubuntu solves the question of 'I just ported but I have no 
clue how it works' with the main/universe/multiverse repo split, so you know 
which package is really cared for and when are you treading more dangerous 
waters with regard to support (this also defines where the bugreports go -> 
for a universe package most of the stuff will go upstream -> unlike packages 
in main which have maintainers/packagers who actually have the knowledge to 
check/fix bugs and decide if a bug is worth sending upstream or not.

There is a downside, of course - dependencies get more tricky with multiple 
repositories, but with a clearly defined procedure and repository purpose 
that can be remedied in most cases. The alternative, shoveling everything 
into a single giant melting pot repo (regardless of license, level of support 
or origin) did not work for Debian or Ubuntu, so I'm a bit skeptical if it's 
the right way to go in Maemo, either.