[maemo-developers] How to destroy your community

[From: Igor Stoppa]

ext Jeremiah Foster wrote:

>
>>> 4) "Project decisions should be made in closed-door meetings."
>>>
>>> 5) "Employ large amounts of legalese."
>>>
>>> 7) "Keep the decision-making powers unclear"
>>>       
>
> Unfortunately a bit of this is true. But this is part of maemo's dual nature, the half-closed, half-open beastie. To be honest, in a project like debian the entire infrastructure is open to debian developers so there is no closed-door, no cabal. Maemo could do better here.
In the end Nokia is expecting to create - and sell! - Maemo based products.
So some choices are product driven and unfortunately cannot be 
communicated / discussed publicly.

However some community members have already been involved in testing the 
recent upgrades before the release, so maybe what could happen in the 
future is that there could be a larger involvement of people who are not 
Nokia employees but agree to sign NDAs for being part of early discussions.

A similar example comes from the kernel community, where a pool of 
kernel developers is willing to sing NDAs with industrial players to 
have access to device documentations and create/improve kernel drivers.

igor