[maemo-developers] Is mauku open source, i.e free or is in non-free?

[From: Eduardo Lima (Etrunko)]

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 2:52 PM, Pauli Virtanen <pav at iki.fi> wrote:
> to, 2010-01-28 kello 10:51 -0500, Aldon Hynes kirjoitti:
> [clip]
>>   I do not see any intended malice in Marius' email and I do not mean to
>> pick on him.  However, I am very concerned that much of the tone here may
>> drive away mobile phone application developers that are not Linux
>> evangelists.  I think that would be unfortunate.  I would like to see the
>> N900 and its descendents as dominant devices in the smartphone market.  To
>> do so, we need to think about how we relate to all developers.
>
> The main question here is probably whether the 'free' and 'non-free'
> repositories (sub-repositories?) have the same service level:
> autobuilder and QA mainly.
>
> If they do, then I don't think there is an argument why Maemo couldn't
> apply the same policies as Debian or Fedora vs. free/non-free content.
> The developer should just pick the correct choice when submitting the
> app.
>

Not that I'm aware of. Packages submitted to the autobuilder will end
up on free, while for non-free packages, you should build the binaries
in your own scratchbox installation and then upload the result to
extras-devel to the non-free queue using dput. AFAIR, there is no web
interface for uploading binary-only packages to the repositories.

> Anyway, the main point seems to be controlling the license situation in
> the Maemo repository -- the licenses of the applications are not shown
> anywhere in the package metadata. For developers and some users this
> would be interesting information to have.
>
>>   Would it make sense for maemo.org to have non-gratis repositories?
>> Personally, I think there is value to this.  One of the complaints about
>> Apple is the way they control their App Store.  Unless you jailbreak your
>> iPhone, you need to run apps from the App Store, which is a pain to get apps
>> into and gives Apple complete control over what gets run on non-jailbroke
>> phones.
>
> Non-gratis software requires that someone organizes the payment and
> content distribution channels. Nokia as a big company obviously is in a
> position to do so, but I'm not sure what maemo.org with its (if I
> understand correctly) mainly volunteer work force can do here.
>

For non-gratis or paid applications, the right channel in my point of
view would be the Ovi store. Maemo.org can and hosts non-free (libre)
software which are free of charge or gratis.


-- 
Eduardo de Barros Lima
INdT - Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia
eblima at gmail.com