[maemo-developers] Open Letter/Proposal to allow Maemo on the MeeGo Community OBS

[From: David Greaves]

This is an open letter to the whole MeeGo community and on behalf of the Maemo 
development community. The purpose of this letter is to ask the MeeGo community 
for their permission to bring Maemo build targets (currently Fremantle 
eventually Harmattan, Diablo, Chinook?) to the MeeGo Community OBS and to ask 
the Maemo development community for their support in this project.

*Please discuss on meego-community mailing list*

I would like to emphasise that this is a Maemo Community initiative and is not 
being pushed by Nokia.

At this point we are not aware of any similar initiatives related to the Moblin 
community but we would fully support any that arise.

The Maemo community has built up around Nokia devices which, in many ways, are 
amongst the most open devices available in their class. There is a passion for 
openness in the Maemo community and we know that the future for this family of 
devices lies with MeeGo.

Many of us are looking forward to MeeGo and are keen to transition as smoothly 
as possible.

However our devices are not fully open and developing for them has dependencies 
on vendor proprietary binaries which would need to be available on the build 
service. This would mean putting closed binaries on the MeeGo OBS and having a 
part of the MeeGo Community OBS functionality being 'restricted' to Maemo 
developers.

Naturally we recognise and respect that MeeGo is an open source project and 
there may be ideological issues in allowing closed binaries into the ecosystem 
(even though they're just for build/linking). We also recognise the risk of 
"opening the door" to closed binaries and suggest that this arrangement could be 
agreed as a one-time "grandfathering in" 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause) situation for the Maemo community.

However we also feel that the benefits of supporting a smooth transition for the 
vibrant Maemo development community would be worthwhile both for MeeGo and Maemo:

* developers would be able to use the OBS' natural ability to target Fremantle, 
Harmattan and MeeGo from a single location. This would bring more developers and 
their applications to MeeGo sooner.

* many of the same people in the Maemo and MeeGo community teams look after the 
Maemo Autobuilder and the MeeGo application OBS. Our limited volunteer time 
would be used more effectively on a single platform instance.

* resources earmarked for Maemo could be added to the MeeGo estate and would 
naturally be used at peak efficiency as Maemo demand decreases and MeeGo demand 
rises.

* new Maemo community Quality Assurance processes would evolve around the shared
OBS and could assist the development of MeeGo QA processes.

and perhaps most important of all:

* users of existing devices could expect a significantly longer maintainable 
life from products built on a consolidated build service and could look forward 
to their applications being available on MeeGo as soon as devices become available.

The maemo.org buildservice already has a 'proof of concept' instance of the OBS 
which allows the Fremantle target to co-exist with a MeeGo target and we already 
intend to use this as a basis for the MeeGo community OBS.

The proposed solution *must* allow MeeGo community users to use the MeeGo 
Community OBS without any reference to Nokia closed binaries; this facet of the 
service should be entirely optional.

Equally the legal issues around the closed binaries require an EULA related to 
demonstrated possession of a relevant device. This can be handled in a similar 
manner to the Maemo Autobuilder service; ie registration of a serial# to a 
developer account.

The proposal therefore is:

* To provide the closed binaries as a build-target repository (probably DoD for 
those who know and care) on the community OBS.

* To grant ACL based access to this repository based on acceptance of an EULA

* To *not* require any such EULA for 'MeeGo-only' accounts on the service

I've run this by Tero Kejo in Nokia and he's very supportive of the
idea.

From:
  David Greaves / lbt
	Community Member and build systems guy.
  Niels Breet / X-Fade
	maemo.org webmaster and autobuild owner	
  Carsten Munk / Stskeeps
	maemo.org distmaster
  Andrew Flegg / Jaffa
	on behalf of the Maemo Community Council