Nokia supporting Hildon Foundation in ecosystem infrastructure move

The Hildon Foundation Board made a surprising and welcome announcement last week, notifying the community that Nokia has offered to cover the costs of migration for maemo.org: "In a conference held by Nokia, Nemein and the Hildon Foundation, Nokia has offered to help economically in the process of migration. The details for starting the migration are under discussion. Nokia is already working with the Hildon Foundation in a legal document to cover the transferring process ofmaemo.org assets. While this document is being reviewed and completed, the migration process of services should take place during the month of December."

Details are still being discussed, but so far Nokia will cover the costs of the migration and of new hardware for the site. Funding for hosting costs at Nemein will need to be covered by the foundation beginning in 2013.

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Nokia supporting Hildon Foundation in ecosystem infrastructure move
2. Development
   • Port Qt apps from MeeGo to BlackBerry 10 to potentially get $10,000
3. Community
   • Council meeting minutes from 23rd November

The holidays just around the corner and many project leaders running around in panic, I guess that could sum up the life for many this time of year. Now you might wonder why this time of year might be a headache for a project leader, the reason is quite simple and it spells resources. During Xmas holidays you often only have a ghost crew for a couple of days, you still want anyone actually in the office too have something to do. Just having people sitting around doing nothing is quite expensive and also very boring. Of course there is no silver bullet to fix this “problem”; you just have to be a bit creative. Here are at least a few suggestions:

• If you use scrum it might be an idea to switch to Kanban during Xmas, you could still keep the same delivery schedule etc to avoid getting out of rhythm.
• Seek and destroy defects
• Build competence!
• See who manage to eat the most of the left over Xmas candy!

If you have any other great idea, feel free to send it to me and I might post it on the blog!

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Nokia supporting Hildon Foundation in ecosystem infrastructure move

The Hildon Foundation Board made a surprising and welcome announcement last week, notifying the community that Nokia has offered to cover the costs of migration for maemo.org: "In a conference held by Nokia, Nemein and the Hildon Foundation, Nokia has offered to help economically in the process of migration. The details for starting the migration are under discussion. Nokia is already working with the Hildon Foundation in a legal document to cover the transferring process of maemo.org assets. While this document is being reviewed and completed, the migration process of services should take place during the month of December."

Details are still being discussed, but so far Nokia will cover the costs of the migration and of new hardware for the site. Funding for hosting costs at Nemein will need to be covered by the foundation beginning in 2013.

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Nokia supporting Hildon Foundation in ecosystem infrastructure move
2. Development
   • Port Qt apps from MeeGo to BlackBerry 10 to potentially get $10,000
3. Community
   • Council meeting minutes from 23rd November

Many IT systems are insecure, others are simply dangerous. Some people argue that this is because the vendors that develop them are ignorant. I think not. However, I do believe they like money. A quarterly report with great numbers is never wrong.

It costs 5-10% more to develop a secure system than a clumsy and insecure system. If the organisation making the system has never worked securely in the past the cost can be up to 25% more, but this rapidly decreases as the processes become embedded. Despite the cost, the investment is worthwhile because higher quality radically reduces downtime, successful hacker attacks and other ills. Not to mention fewer headaches.

When development is placed with an external provider, the problem is that you take the business risk while the supplier delivers to a specification. If security is not included in the specification, then security will not be delivered. Why would the supplier reduce their margins by 5-10%? If a provider includes security in the price when it hasn’t been requested, they may even lose the deal because the customer chooses a cheaper alternative.

There is only one solution. Include security requirements in the contract and follow them up. Believe me, you do not want software that does not meet at least the following:

1. The system should not have any of the SANS 25 programming errors and, if it is a web application, it should not have any security holes in the OWASP Top 10.
2. The supplier should specify which software components, including version numbers, are used to create the system.
3. The supplier should use only standard methods for encryption and signing. All security-related documentation should be available on request.
4. You should have the right to review the security system.
5. The supplier should provide documentation on how the system has been installed, with a minimum of access rights to the operating system and what network traffic is necessary for the system to work in the particular environment.
6. The supplier should indicate the update cycle.
7. The supplier should be able to demonstrate how security is integrated into the system lifecycle.
8. Depending on which comes first, the supplier should provide information on vulnerabilities detected in the system within thirty days or when an update is issued that resolves the problem.
9. The system should log all events and comply with SIEM standards.
10. The system should be able to identify and authenticate users and confirm eligibility. It should comply with open IAM standards.

Really, you should conduct a security analysis to ascertain the right level of security and cost framework. But the above points are a good start. Then you won’t be disappointed by system crashes or being pulverised by hackers. And you can happily throw the headache pills in the bin.

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We’d like to take a minute to unveil the new Hildon Foundation website:

http://hildonfoundation.org

As you’ll see, there is a fairly easy way to donate to the Hildon Foundation and the Maemo Community:

http://hildonfoundation.org/support/

This is the same method that’s being used here on tmo:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=1303767

This post contains the meeting minutes for both the 2012-11-30 and the 2012-12-07 meetings. As the person responsible for preparing these minutes and posting them in a timely manner, I apologize to the community for falling behind on them these last two weeks. It is worth noting that since these meetings took place, there has been discussion on the TMO infrastructure topic, both internally and visibly to the community through Board posts, and probably to some extent forum discussion. So the bullets regarding TMO infrastructure issues do not necessarily reflect the latest information by any means.

According to Cosimo Kroll (zehjotkah), long-time maemo.org community member and contributor, and Hildon Foundation treasurer, the Maemo Community has stepped up in a serious way, donating more than $1000.00 US in the first 24-hours of the call to support the community.

Thank you, everyone, for your support and dedication to this cause. The Maemo Community is one of the most incredible open source communities around — and, exactly why the Hildon Foundation was formed.

You are the best.

If you haven’t donated yet, please consider it. It is the only way that this community will survive. You may make a contribution (any amount helps) here:

http://hildonfoundation.org/support/

Do you know how when you get sick you suddenly cannot remember anything about your life but being sick in the past? With almost every memory gone, all your life is reduced to a series of very similar events that form a parallel reality that, as someone once said, you only get to experience for a short time. WebKitGTK+ hackfests often feel a bit like this, the difference being that this is the kind of disease that you look forward to as a child in order to skip school and stay at home playing video games. A couple dozen hackers sitting in a bright clean room, safe from the rainy weather, programming for hours on end until they have to be literally kicked out of the place. Lots of coffee. A blackboard full of tasks. Tortilla and beers, or pulpo if you are the sort of person that would eat an animal that can predict the outcome of football matches. The parallel life we live for a few days every December, in Igalia‘s Coruña headquarters.

Hey former Harmattan peeps. How about we do a little bit of this Jolla stuff after our hours and see where it goes? You never know, and neither have any of the technologies and improvements that we did for Nokia harmed us. It’s at #jollamobile on FreeNode. Btw. Ping me if you are going to FOSDEM. Maybe we can discuss how we can revive some of our Harmattan projects? Personally, I’m thinking about reducing the role of Tracker’s FS miner in Jolla by first refactoring libtracker-extract and adapting buteo to call for metadata extraction instead of letting miner-fs pick the newly added files up. Dead to file system monitoring on phones!

At the same time I’m also working with Calligra a lot lately. Which is by the way awesome stuff. Can’t choose.

Apologies for the delay, but there were several logistical aspects that had to be resolved…

Nokia's funding for maemo.org is ending: call for donations

Council member, Joerg Reisenweber has announced a need for donations to keep all of maemo.org running as Nokia step back from support: "I have to inform all of you that we're approaching a critical date for all of us: Nokia is about to stop funding our infrastructure and board and council are busy to establish a new set of servers to run all the bits we need to continue with our daily maemo-life. First impact is on this very forum, which we need to either move to a new server until end of the year, or as a last resort find some 500 bucks to buy one more month of operation on the old one, until we established the move end of January then. There are other expenses the board is facing right now to ensure a smooth continuation of services like repositories, wiki, whatnot else."

Recapping from my last blog article; I worked a bit on this concept during the weekend.

Meeting held on FreeNode, channel #maemo-meeting (logs)

Attending: DocScrutinizer05, qwazix, ivgalvez, Mentalist Traceur.
Absent: NielDK.

Summary of topics (ordered by discussion):
- CC Device Issue Almost At Dead End
- Hildon Foundation Monthly Monetary Reports
- Infrastructure

Topic  (CC Device Issue Almost At Dead End):

• qwazix still has no reply from anyone about the CC devices.
• ivgalvez recently acquired one more Nokia contact, who he will try.

Topic  (Hildon Foundation Monthly Monetary Reports):

• Mentalist Traceur brought up for consideration that the Board could publish a monthly (or some other timeframe) report to the community, saying how much money was earned, how much was spent where, and what the financial aftermath was for Hildon Foundation for that month.
• There was mutual agreement with this suggestion.
• ivgalvez will forward this suggestion to the Board

Topic  (Infrastructure):

• Nokia agreed to pay for everything except TMO for two months while the preparations for a transition are ongoing.
• TMO, however, has no such provision, and is thus fairly urgent.
• TMO will be needing an administrator in the near future.
• It is looking likely that the Foundation will have to hire a professional sysadmin at some point, if there is no sufficiently skilled volunteer.
• We had a significant debate about what the better course of action was (note: infrastructure decisions are decided by Board, not Council, so this has only indirect influence on policy, if any).
• The disagreement largely boils down to whether the hosting of talk.maemo.org forums and the other maemo.org website needs to be on one server, and more importantly, how soon should the servers be consolidated.
• It is also partly informed by a claim made that the laws of the US (where TMO is currently hosted) would require us to notify and/or get the agreement of all TMO members before the forum could be relocated to the EU.
• The details of the discussion can be seen in the IRC log, linked above, but were not included in the minutes for brevity.

• ivgalvez will contact his remaining Nokia contact in the hope of getting the CC issue unstuck.
• ivgalvez will forward the monthly (or other time period) Foundation financial report to community idea to the Board.

This is just a quick note of thanks (again) to the Maemo Community for stepping up and donating their hard-earned money in order to keep our community alive.

Because of your donations and the help of many community members — especially Reggie Suplido (rsuplido), long-time Maemo Community member and Super Admin of TMO (talk.maemo.org) and internettablettalk.com — we were able to purchase a license for vBulletin, the software that runs the TMO forums.

But, what does this mean for our community? It means that when we are set to migrate all of the maemo.org infrastructure to new servers at the end of this year, TMO will be coming with it. Hopefully, due to the migration and the vBulletin license, the community downtime will be negligible.

Again, thank you for supporting this community. And, if you haven’t donated any money yet, please consider doing so here:

http://hildonfoundation.org/support/

Happy Holidays everyone!