Thread: Introducing the licensing change requests queue
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lcuk is offline lcuk
2010-08-13 , 10:42
Posts: 1,635 | Thanked: 1,816 times | Joined on Apr 2008 @ Manchester, England
#38
Originally Posted by qgil View Post
A sequence that might help you understand more the current situation:
  1. At some point I explained in maemo.org that opening legacy software takes resources appointed elsewhere, and in some cases we would do it if someone would push and do the actual job.
  2. The Maemo Community Council came up with a proposal for the role of the distmaster, proposing Carsten (Stskeeps) as the ideal guy backed by his work in Mer.
  3. Tero and me did the numbers and agreed with Carsten to fund his role as maemo.org distmaster.
  4. Carsten starts his work. He gets access to some old and fresh code, plus Nokia internal contacts and info. afair he gets involved in a report explaining the current situation, helps on the Diablo community updates initiative, on the closed graphics drivers for the N8*0 (stellar work done by him behind the doors), the licensing queue announced in this thread, etc.
  5. Then MeeGo is launched, picking by surprise everybody. I can't remember now, but I believe Carsten was not aware at all.
  6. Yet he is one of the most skilled guys around to start playing with the N900 port and the MeeGo OBS. He is offered more work and responsibilities within the MeeGo project - basically a full time job.
  7. In the meantime both the core Mer guys and Nokia people like Tero or myself get convinced that the best technical and tactical way to address openness in the tablets and the N900 is to follow the MeeGo development mainline, adapting it to this hardware. Nokia is opening a lot of functionality for MeeGo Handset and the MeeGo project has chosen the N900 as official ARM platform. The current is favourable in that direction and Nokia is putting serious resources in that direction with the MeeGo N900 port.
This is the situation now, more or less. We are again in point 1, but with a big difference: now there is a MeeGo project officially backed by Nokia that is all about open development of open source components.

Tero and I could sit again and see if there is budget for a new maemo.org distmaster that would take care of legacy closed components... But honestly, if I would need to make that decision I would recommend to put those resources in someone helping to push faster and better the relicensing of closed components from MeeGo stakeholders, and also real and effective open development from the companies joining MeeGo development.

I understand this doesn't bring the short term benefit that fixing a Diablo/Fremantle binary blob brings, but the actions (specially when they involve money and resources) must be taken with a wider perspective.

Hey, my current role in the as Pre-Integrator in the Maemo Application Framework team puts me in a position to see both sides of the coin.
I have integrated and worked with the open and closed aspects of the system for a while now and have a high level of understanding of the complexities.

There is a crossroads coming in my current role since obviously the official teams are scaling down.

One of the principle things I have said over the time I have been here is that I do not mind closed source code as long as it is actively maintained.

I am passionate about Maemo and would be happy to discuss adding this feather to my cap and trying to open up as much of the stack as possible to allow the community to continue to maintain and build on our Maemo.

I do however understand that certain pieces of code will never be open, so on that basis would hope to continue to push the internal teams to offering important security fixes as they arise.

I do not want to just open the code and let it rot though.

It would be even better if the community improvements and advancements could be integrated into further "service packs" so that we gain the best of the best.
The community SSU created for the n810 shows that this can in practice work.

It has been shown already that variations and branches of the already open code is worthwhile and people in the community are happy to fix bugs and submit patches and there is activity in the Hildon components as well as many other areas - even as far as custom kernels.

Where do I apply?
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