The six of us laughed out loud as we filed into the sound-proof broadcast room that peered over the dark green expanse of Aviva Stadium in Dublin, Ireland. The irony of a private meeting between an otherwise open group of people was understood by all. Still, the only way that the current Maemo Community Council (along with Nokia employee, Tero Kojo) was going to find any sense of relief from the constant conference noise turned out to be in a room designed to keep others out. Privacy wasn't the point of this meeting, though. First, these sorts of events are the only time that the Council is ever able to meet face to face. Second, there weren't a whole lot of people at MeeGo Conference 2010 who would care much about what we were talking about. But, in our opinions the subjects which we discussed were quite important to our corner of the open source world, and may impact the future of Maemo quite extraordinarily. Glasses of wine and pints of beer accompanied a conversation that was both highly interesting and very fun.
Planet maemo: category "feed:0ffd60645267b49419c542bd55f461df"
Greetings, and welcome to another term for the Maemo Community Council. This is the first of what I'm hoping will be an ongoing "State of Maemo" series (that will most likely come out periodically rather than regularly). As we begin our new term, the Council has already come up against a few immediate concerns. Thankfully, those members of the Council who have expertise in these areas have been able to handle most of it from the Maemo perspective (which, of course, where the strength lies in the Council to begin with). Still, there will be times in which we do not have the collective knowledge or know-how to be able to tackle issues sufficiently. As always, we look to you, the Maemo Community, for help in this regard. And, even more so, we look to you for guidance in which items are of interest or at crucial points of development (or break down). This being said, before continuing with this address, I'd like to personally thank you, on behalf of the entire Council, for your diligence and help in making the Maemo Community a world class open source community of end-users and experts.
For those who missed it, we settled on a time & date for a maemo.org team & community meeting, to set the short term agenda & evaluate progress. The meeting will be held today, Thursday 16th September, in #maemo-meeting, at midday UTC.
The agenda is:
- Overview of current paid resources for maemo.org, and current thoughts on roadmap/future (Tero Kojo)
- Overview of Brainstorm roadmap progress & current status:
- Introduction (Community Council rep)
- SSO (Tero/Niels)
- Garage (Ferenc)
- Packages & Downloads (Niels)
- Bugzilla (Andre)
- Wiki (Dave)
- Planet & News (Henri)
- Talk (Reggie)
- Discussion around community handover of maemo.org
- Next steps (Community Council rep)
- AOB
"How do you use multitasking in N900?" That's the question asked by Peter Schneider, head of the Marketing in Nokia's MeeGo Devices team.
"Obviously, multitasking in the Nokia N900 is rather decent (my way of saying it's the best out there). BUT, are you making full use of it? Help me to understand how you use the multitasking feature. Your feedback is appreciated and taken into account in the MeeGo Marketing approach now and in the future."
Participating in this poll could really shape Nokia's vision of multitasking on their MeeGo devices, and it's encouraging to see them reaching out to the power-user, enthusiast and developer community on this topic.
The available options, based on the number of "mini-windows" you see in Maemo 5's task switcher, are:
- None. I'm happyily single-tasking
- 1 to 3 apps
- 4 to 6 apps
- 6 to 9 apps
- More than 9 apps
- Plenty, I never close any app but leave them all open
» Vote now!
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Dave Neary has continued in his role of handling the election of a new Maemo Community Council, and published the list of eligible candidates. There are over 500 eligibile candidates. To nominate yourself, or someone else, you need to send an email to the maemo-community mailing list:
To nominate yourself or someone else for the council, please email the maemo-community mailing list with a clear email header (something like
"Council nomination: Michael Mouse" for example).People who are nominated should accept (or refuse) such a nomination, if they are not nominating themselves. Apart from that, nominations don't require a seconder.
Nominations are open until 23:59 Wednesday, 8th September; so you have just under two weeks to get your preferred candidates on the ballot sheet!
It's been six months which have flown by, but the current Maemo Community Council's term is coming to an end and it's time for the election of five people to the council who represent the Maemo community's interests to Nokia and vice-versa.
The next election's voting will run from Thursday, 16th September to Wednesday, 22nd September.
What's it for?
The council is a body of volunteers taken from the Maemo community. It acts as a focal point for the Maemo community, representing developers on, and users of, maemo.org to Nokia (and vice versa). Examples of council activity can be found on the Council homepage or in the blog, but also in the tens of little things that happen in the background of which you may be unaware.
For example, in this term, some of the issues the Council dealt with include:
- Cease & desist issues over Chromium distribution
- The release of PR1.2
- The bundling of Nokia's "MyNokia" service with PR1.2
- The pushing of Ovi Store for Maemo, but the limited set of technologies it supports
- The Fremantle Developer Device Queue
- Improvements to the Extras-testing process
- The evolution of MeeGo
- The MeeGo Conference (replacing the annual Maemo Summit)
- The announcement that Nokia will not be supplying a commercial-quality MeeGo variant to N900 end-users
- Implementing a set of rules for talk.maemo.org
- A brainstorm on the future of the Maemo community
- The increasing move of focus of Nokia from Maemo maintenance and support to MeeGo growth.
What's next?
Community members should be considering whether they want to stand. When nominations open, you can nominate someone via an email to maemo-community (which they must reply to to accept) or you can put your own hat into the ring by emailing the same list. A further announcement will be made when nominations open, with more information.
The election timescale (all times UTC) is:
Voting closes:23:59, Wednesday, 22nd September 2010 Voting opens:
00:00, Thursday, 16th September 2010 Hust ings Nominations close:
23:59, Wednesday, 8th September 2010 Nominations open:
00:00, Thursday, 26th August 2010
How's it work?
The election is a "single transferrable vote". Each member of maemo.org, who has had an account for over 3 months and earned over 10 "karma" points, gets a ballot. They rank their candidates in order of preference; if their top candidate cannot get elected with the votes they receive, the votes are redistributed until all five seats have been allocated.
Anyone who has karma of over 100 is eligible to stand, including employees and sub-contractors of Nokia.
With the merger of Moblin (Intel) and Maemo (Nokia) to form MeeGo, a single MeeGo conference is being held in Dublin, November 15th-17th (Monday-Wednesday, inclusive). This replaces the Maemo Summit which was held so successfully in 2008 (Berlin) and 2009 (Amsterdam).
"I want to speak!"
There is just one week left to submit your session proposal. Apart from these main sessions & keynotes, there will also be lightning talk slots opened up shortly. However, if you want to give a full-blown talk or run a bird-of-a-feather (BoF) session you must submit your proposal before August 23rd (even if you work for Intel, Nokia, the Linux Foundation, maemo.org, meego.com, ...). [EDIT: BoFs should be submitted now too!]
"I want to go..."
Members of the Maemo community who want to learn more about MeeGo, see it on N900s and netbooks, or even promote their latest Maemo hacks are encouraged to register.
"...but I can't afford it"
As with the Maemo Summits, a number of sponsorship places are available. When registering tick the checkbox for Travel Assistance. If selected (by a panel from the Linux Foundation, and the MeeGo, Moblin and Maemo communities), travel (air fare) and accomodation (at the D4) will be paid for.
If you have requested sponsorship, you should not book any plane tickets, but you should book yourself into the hotel.
"Where should I stay?"
The conference organisers have booked 530 rooms at the D4 hotel, which has a couple of properties within easy walking distance of the venue; and still close to the Dublin city centre. It is requested that people stay there, until all the rooms are booked.
The prices (including breakfast), are at a special rate for the conference:
- €105 per room, per night for a single
- €115 per room, per night for a double
- €115 per room, per night for a twin
"I have other questions!"
Questions should be directed to the MeeGo Community Forum, where you can log in with your maemo.org OpenID and password.
It will come as a surprise for many community members and users that Python is still not an officially supported language/runtime on the Maemo nor MeeGo platforms, despite the huge number of Python applications currently in Extras, and even though they base on the work of Nokia's own PyMaemo team, plus two Qt bindings and a GTK+/Hildon one. To put things in perspective, about a third of ALL stable Maemo applications are written in Python, both overall and those using Qt.
The community level support means Python itself is located in community repositories, and, as a consequence, Python software is not admissible to Ovi (regardless of being free or not). Highlighting this is part of a broader agenda - ensuring cooperation between libraries and runtimes used by Ovi-distributed software and software in community repositories, but the first step towards that is addressing the single biggest such case - Python.
If there are technical issues which need to be addressed, let's discuss them in the open and try and solve them; if there are purely political issues, we strongly urge Nokia to reconsider.
Maemo Community Council
The packages depending on them were also removed to avoid broken dependency chains and non-installable packages. Should the original authors or new maintainers decide to update the packages to the current version of Qt, the sources will remain available through the source repositories.
Note that this deprecation does not affect the libqt4-maemo5 package, which is part of Qt4.6 in PR1.2+. The next step in the Qt transition process is the upload of QtMobility packages for Qt4.7 (libqt4-experimental-*) into extras-devel.
The Maemo Community Council raised with Nokia the issue that upgrading to Maemo 5 PR1.2 forces the user to subscribe, via SMS, to the "MyNokia" service. The user has no ability to opt-out: it's either subscribe or don't use the device.
This is a joint statement from Nokia and the Maemo Community Council.
A few weeks ago we received a letter requesting that maemo.org cease distribution of Chromium, due to ongoing litigation involving the software.
The Community Council, the package maintainer of Chromium on maemo.org and Nokia legal were contacted.
As you are aware, it is Nokia's policy to respect the intellectual property rights of third parties. Thus, we suggested that Chromium be removed from maemo.org while the situation was clarified.
Nokia legal will be taking a look on the roles and responsibilities of maemo.org. This work should clarify the roles on maemo.org so the process would be clear if we were to receive any future requirements as the one from Red Bend.