[maemo-developers] How to destroy your community

[From: 白い熊]

Jeremiah Foster <jeremiah at jeremiahfoster.com> writes:

> engadget:
> "...company's commitment to open source and the Maemo development community is commendable -- it's something that should absolutely continue -- but going forward, we'd love to see what kinds of magical things could happen if it took development to 100 percent feature completion internally with a full round of usability testing before handing it off to the eager geeks in the field. The mere thought sends shivers down our spine."

This ain't a rant at Nokia, but I don't think they have any "commitment
to open source". It's a huge corporate entity, and I've seen written
somewhere something along the lines: the end users don't care about the
system, they care about features. That's the corporate attitude any
company has, IMO, and I think Nokia's management is of the same
view. I.e. the end user doesn't care if the device runs on GNU/Linux,
Symbian etc., they just want features and useability.

And for the 99.99% of users I think this actually holds. Now, not for
us, i.e. GNU/Linux is the only reason I bought this device, not for love
of Nokia, or for some fantastic soft I thought they'd have on the phone,
but rather because of the freedom, that you can really do "almost
anything you want" as the phone is almost fully free...

Anyhow, I think the reason that Nokia is continuing to develop the Maemo
platform is that they must be thinking that the FLOSS community will
help them make the system greater, thereby bringing in some amazing
app/useability development, and then this'll reward them for investing
into Maemo. I don't know what business logic that's based on, but these
are guys in suits and ties, eh..., they usually make bandwagon
decisions, what do you expect :O)

Now in light of this, I think Jeff's original point holds very much
true. I mean, throughout the past weeks I've been thinking: WTF, how can
these amateurs maintaining the repositories (meaning Nokia Maemo people)
get by with this. Now leaving aside the fact whether maemo.org is Nokia
or not, it don't matter IMO. The conclusion to me is that Maemo still
must be a fringe platform within Nokia to the extent that some corporate
smartass is thinking, OK let's let these GNU/Linux geeks play in their
little scratchbox, maybe something is gonna come out of it, but let's
not devote lumps of corporate resources to this. And that's why this
totally ridiculous state of the matters persists, i.e. servers down
etc.

Man, in fact, all of the Nokia defenders that have been getting on
Jeff's case these past days, because of some "tone" of his letter or
something (laugh out loud), have gently ignored the point, that he was
the only guy who actually did something about it ever before starting
this thread, i.e. starting his mirror of the repositories, which have
enabled quite some developpers to actually use the device these past
days.

So I support his point strongly and am just surprised Nokia ain't
reactin', maybe not to his criticism, but state of the matters, unless
Maemo really is some fringe one or two-guys sideshow at Nokia.

-- 
C уважением / 宜しく御願い致します / Best regards / S pozdravem / Z poważaniem / Mit freundlichen Grüßen

白い熊