Community distribution of Maemo, and other updates

A recent comment on bugzilla by Marius Vollmer got me fired up on an idea jott has tossed around in the past. An osso-software-version-community—a community distribution of Maemo.

A community distribution lets us do a lot of cool things that working within the limits of Nokia's setup does not. It'll allow us to ship an OS that isn't so locked down by Nokia's corporate policy, remove dependencies on proprietary advertising (Skype, Gizmo, etc.), remove superfluous and problem-causing bundled media and documentation, modify existing packages with community patches, and ship community add-ons and community-patched Nokia applications. It gives us a distribution that is more stable, more useful, more versatile and more interesting.

I've started drafting a proposal of jott's idea in the wiki. I've outlined some of the issue we'll need to tackle, and started fleshing out the specific ideas on what packages we'll add, remove, and modify (anybody up for a graphical bootmenu with a GUI control panel applet to configure it with, perhaps? ;)). Discussion is being held on maemo-developers, and feel free to add your ideas to the wiki.

There are really a lot of cool things we can do with a community distribution not encumbered by Nokia's corporate policies. So let's take the strong software foundation Maemo Software has given us and really run with it.

In other news, I've been working on killing the old wiki for good, as it's been cluttering up google results, cluttering up maemo.org and generally making a nuisance of itself as an un-editable-wiki-paradox that's providing practically zero useful information.

I ran through the list of old pages to see what more could be salvaged and what pages should be replaced with redirects (Don't break the web!) to the new wiki. I think I did a fair enough sweep, but my definition of useful isn't the same as someone else's, so if some more people could eyeball my list and add anything they think should be moved and/or redirected, it'd be much appreciated.