On 8/29/06, Devesh Kothari <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Now what we are concentrating on, beside improving the above is to enable participation and contribution in stages to different parts of maemo, starting with HAF/Sardine which I hope would extend. The starting up and adoption barrier for sardine are being recognized, and we are now trying to make it easy to adopt and use sardine, without sacrificing the genral device usability. This would enable the patches or feature implementations by community to be made and tested on the latest svn codebase, so the component owners can integrate/accept/reject them. There has been excellent work done for enabling dual boot by Frantisek Dufka http://maemo.org/maemowiki/BootMenu
Sardine certainly looks like a step in the right direction in terms of integrating the community into the development process, kind of like Red Hat does with its Fedora Project. Nokia, like Red Hat, has a shipping product that it needs some degree of control over, but also an active community that has its own ideas and wishes. Hopefully Sardine will help make the Maemo project better and keep both Nokia and the Maemo community happy. Ideally, in the future there could be complete, unofficial "product images" (as Nokia calls them) that are created by the community, for example maybe one that incorporates only free software (in the GNU or OSI sense). Maybe something similar to Red Hat's derivative policy towards Fedora. That would be a particularly popular one among some, I would venture. Similar to OpenZaurus for the Sharp PDAs, but within the auspices of the Maemo community. Unaddressed so far, however, is the Bluetooth headset issue--more generally, hardware details that are necessary to create such a distribution. Headset support would be an extremely useful feature, one that I would like myself, but unfortunately no one outside Nokia (or TI or whoever made the Bluetooth chip) has the necessary details. This is an area where the current top-down structure of the Maemo project fails. You (the Nokia engineers) seem genuinely interested in listening to the community, I would be willing to bet that either adding the necessary support to the the Maemo kernel or providing documentation to interested parties would silence a longstanding gripe of some of us. (Just a personal gripe of mine: Proper monitor mode support in the WLAN driver so Kismet will run correctly. The Nokia 770 is by far the most perfect device to run Kismet on that I have ever seen--it's a shame it doesn't work right. :) ) _______________________________________________ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
