Hi Andrew, Andrew Flegg wrote: > On the back of my post, "maemo.org: what next?"[1], it was interesting > to read in yesterday's LWN that the community around OpenSolaris feels > very much shut out of internal Sun development processes: > > http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/280452/8f5b64d861d8f79e/
Indeed - an interesting read. He quoted some very good sources ;-) > Reading this, it was very striking the number of similarities with > Nokia's situation with maemo and the maemo community. The above is a > free link, but I strongly recommend you subscribe to LWN[2] if you > haven't already. While I'm still getting to know the maemo community, I think tyhat the difference is in the goals, and in the means that Nokia are putting at the disposition of the community to achieve those goals. Yes, Nokia employees were behind most of the early maemo work. But they also chose to hire small companies with established free software credentials (OpenedHand, Imendio, OpenIsmus, Nemein, Kernel Concepts, the list goes on) to do much of the work. Even though these guys were working in the beginning under NDA, that's a good sign that Nokia wanted to work with upstream projects, rather than create a walled garden. There's also the way that Nokia is now investing in people like myself Niels, and André and Karsten to ensure that weak points of interaction between the community and any Nokia technology are identified and eliminated. I have not been asked to sign any NDAs, and all the work I do will be out in the open, using information available to the community (or I will be asking for that information to be made available). Nokia's goals appear, at least to me, to be clear (but I have no more information on this than anyone else). Their goal is to make a commercially successful tablet product, using as much free software as possible, and providing an open development platform for developers, thereby creating a vibrant ecosystem of application developers targeting the maemo platform. I expect Nokia to keep some control of Hildon and all of the components on which they build their commercial products. But control comes in many forms. Just employing a maintainer doesn't imply control (just ask Josh Berkus or Linus Torvalds) nor does it imply that significant community contributions are unwelcome. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
