Help determine the feasibility of establishing a German e.V. for the Hildon Foundation

The Hildon Foundation was established as a legal body who could inherit the maemo.org resources from Nokia in order to ensure their continued existence. Unfortunately, it got off to a rocky start with personal agendas, arguments and disagreements.

Fortunately, the recent election (which installed your editor as Chair) resulted in more harmonious, and consensus-driven group - who now have to tidy up the loose ends remaining. Hildon Foundation has decided to move the association from a US-based foundation under the law of Pennsylvania towards a German "eingetragener Verein" (e.V.); but more assistance is needed:

"So if we want to continue this road towards EU, where our server-HW is based and the money actually needs to be accessible, what we'd need for board is at least 3 EU residents who are willing to take the burden of showing responsible and doing all the paperwork for quite some time. Still, the General Assembly (council) is the highest decision making organ of the Association and is generally in charge of all duties, unless these Articles of Association have assigned specific duties to another organ of the Association."

"For the requirements, we would then need 4 more people (7 is minimum) to actually fund and inaugurate the eV with its board; preferrably, but not limited to EU residents (each of them has to sign the inaugurational docs, board as representatives by notarization). These 4 additional funders could be extraordinary members as well as council."

Thoughts welcome on the TMO thread.

Microsoft buys Nokia "Devices and Services" division for $7.2 billion

In what, perhaps, should not be an unsurprising outcome of the appointment of Stephen Elop to head Nokia, Microsoft will be acquiring Nokia's devices and services division as part of a nearly $7.2 billion deal to be finalized early next year, pending regulatory approval:

"Microsoft has purchased Nokia's devices and services unit, bringing the Lumia lineup under the Redmond roof. The move unites Windows Phone 8 with its biggest hardware supporter, giving the company the integrated mobile offering it's been looking for with Surface and other devices. When the deal closes in the first quarter of 2014, Microsoft will pay €3.79 billion for Nokia's business, plus another €1.65 billion to license its portfolio of patents. (The €5.44-billion total is considerably less than Microsoft paid for Skype in 2011.) 32,000 people are expected to transfer from Nokia to Microsoft, including 18,300 that are "directly involved in manufacturing."

The move signals the true end of an era. Nokia's contributions to the mobile phone segment are as significant as, if not more significant than, any other company in the business. Unfortunately, insistence on incremental improvement to their existing platforms while the market's newer players brought fresh ideas and innovation, and Nokia's inability to pursue real innovation despite the expertise, ideas, and products they had available in-house signalled their decline. They hamstrung their innovative products trying to hold on to an ever-shrinking marketshare with Symbian.

Those of us who experienced the heady days of Nokia's forays into Linux will continue to think on the what-might've-been's had Nokia taken a risk and pulled the trigger on something new and innovative. We had a short glimpse into that future when Nokia announced the N9 and MeeGo as their new flagship platform, but the Elopocalypse brought an end to that future. Perhaps the appliances that represent today's mobile device options would include a more open, accessible, and interesting mobile general computing platform had things gone differently.

All is not a bleak future of mobiles appliances, though, as Nokia's fall from grace represents an opportunity for smaller players to enter the market. More open source, and general computing friendly mobile platform have been announced over the past year. Foremost among them, Jolla, with their real-Linux Sailfish platform which is set to ship on the first Jolla device sometime around the end of this year.

Whatever happens to the mobile device market, it undoubtedly will not be uninteresting. On behalf of this publication, your editors would like to wish all of those affected by the transitions taking place at Nokia the best of luck.

Neo900: community-driven successor to the Nokia N900

Using the GTA04 as a base, some members of the Maemo Community are looking to put together a successor device to the N900. Dubbed the Neo900, the device would utilize the GTA04 motherboard design modified to fit into an N900 case. Joerg Reisenweber on the plan:

"We're currently in the planning phase about a maemo5/fremantle-compatible successor of N900, with N900 look-alike (aka case) and a processor with more grunt and RAM. This is already beyond the state of vaporware, see www.gta04.org which this will base on. [...] what we're talking about are slight modification to GTA04 board to make it fit into a Neo900, with housing and display etc sourced from the commercial N900 spare parts market."

"So it wll look like a N900, feel like a N900 and work like a N900, just way faster, thanks to the DM3730 CPU @1GHz and at least 512MB RAM (1GB depending on chip availability) plus maybe a few GB more of fast RAM-based "storage" as swap."

"And - that's our plan - it will have all the functionality you're used to from N900 plus sturdy USB (that won't fall off the PCB) with full OTG support, all sorts of new nice sensors like gyro and altimeter and compass, and a GSM/UMTS, possibly even LTE modem that doesn't break (or when it ever would then you can fix it)."

The hardware upgrade represents a modest improvement over the N900 in most areas. In order to reduce the amount of work required (i.e., a complete board redesign) and maintain compatibility with Fremantle binaries it is still utilizing an OMAP3 SoC. The Neo900 won't compete with modern flagship smartphone devices, but for those looking for a faster N900 (resistive touchscreen, hardware keyboard, open source, mobile computer) to keep using the only currently available mobile general computing platform, it fits the bill.

See the thread for more details and discussion, and links to additional threads on the Neo900.

Autobuilder & Extras Assistant for Maemo 4 fixed

More good news on the autobuilder and Extras Assistant front. Ivaylo Dimitrov's continued hard work has brought them back online for Maemo 4: "I am glad to say that freemangordon have fixed Maemo autobuilder & Extras Assistant for Maemo 4. The packages appear in Maemo Packages interface, are promoted, etc."

Big thanks for the continued hard work from all of the community volunteers helping to ensure both that the maemo.org infrastructure keeps running and that degraded services are brought back to life.

Maemo autobuilder & package interface now fully working again

Ivaylo Dimitrov has completed a substantial part of rebuilding and maintaining the maemo.org infrastructure: the autobuilder and Packages interfaces are now working again (for Maemo 5, at least):

"All of you who were using extras-devel as a replacement to extras, disable extras-devel and extras-testing repositories. Now our packages infra is(or at least looks like) functional, we should revert to the way all this is supposed to work. Testers/users - please do your job and vote for the packages in testing. Developers - promote the stuff to extras." maemo.org is still understaffed, so anyone with any PHP skills, interested in maintaining the Midgard infrastructure which holds everything together, should get in touch with techstaff@maemo.org.

Hildon Foundation Board minutes for meeting on July 16th

The Hildon Foundation is the relatively new body which has taken on legal responsiblity for maemo.org from Nokia. The newest, recently elected, board had their first meeting on IRC to appoint Andrew Flegg as Chair, Craig Woodward as Secretary, win7mac as Treasurer and Ryan Abel as Comms Officer. Rüdiger Schiller is also on the board.

The meeting was a fairly run-of-the-mill handover meeting, focusing on logistics; with Joerg Reisenweber representing the Council and, thus, the users of maemo.org. Unfortunately, due to an administrative oversight, the meeting wasn't pre-announced, but this will be corrected for the next meeting.

Hildon Foundation Board minutes for meeting on July 16th

The Hildon Foundation is the relatively new body which has taken on legal responsiblity for maemo.org from Nokia. The newest, recently elected, board had their first meeting on IRC to appoint Andrew Flegg as Chair, Craig Woodward as Secretary, win7mac as Treasurer and Ryan Abel as Comms Officer. Rüdiger Schiller is also on the board.

The meeting was a fairly run-of-the-mill handover meeting, focusing on logistics; with Joerg Reisenweber representing the Council and, thus, the users of maemo.org. Unfortunately, due to an administrative oversight, the meeting wasn't pre-announced, but this will be corrected for the next meeting.

OpenRepos replaces MeeGo OBS with repositories for community apps

Basil Semuonov has posted to TMO to launch a new service for developers: "Remember the sweet holy time when Meego OBS was alive, and you had your very own personal repository? Well, that awesome time has returned!"

"OpenRepos is a community driven personal repository system for Harmattan and Sailfish operating systems. It provides a repository which can be enabled on your device."

The project still seems to be bootstrapping itself at the moment, but has a laudable goal. It would be good to see this combined, though, with existing efforts on a maemo.org OBS and fit into the existing maemo.org repository system; expanding it to support Harmattan - although that might leave Sailfish a little underhandled.

Hildon Foundation Board of Directors election results in

The results from the Hildon Foundation Board of Directors election for Q2 2013 are in: "Winners are Craig Woodward (Woody14619), Ryan Abel (GeneralAntilles), Andrew Flegg (Jaffa), Rüdiger Schiller (chemist), and Gido Griese (Win7Mac)." 113 ballots were submitted (1 empty).

After some missteps in the Hildon Foundation's early life, and a developing image problem within the community, this is a huge opportunity to get the Hildon Foundation back on course by making sure maemo.org's techstaff and the community council have the tools and support they need to ensure maemo.org and the Maemo Community continue operating smoothly.

Hildon Foundation Board of Directors election opened

The Hildon Foundation Board of Directors election opened on Saturday 2013-06-22 last week. It will run for 7 days, ending at 23:59 UTC on Friday 2013-06-28. The candidates are: Ryan Abel, Andrew Flegg, Win7 Mac, Krzysztof Kuska Rüdiger Schiller, and Craig Woodward. The list of candidates and their nominations are available on the wiki. A questionnaire thread for candidates was also posted on the forum (the last link in this post), the candidates' answers and their nominations are recommended reading before voting.

Emails with voting tokens went out to eligible voters on Friday. maemo.org users with a karma of 10 or higher and an account at least 3 months old are eligible to vote. If you feel you are eligible and did not get a token, check in on the election thread on Talk (second link in this post).

Please remember to cast your vote. Good election turnouts are appreciated by everybody involved with maemo.org, and can be especially invigorating for an incoming body. It also helps ensure the elected candidates will be acceptable to a broader range of community members. Even casting an empty ballot is useful if you'd like to register your protest of some part (or all) of the election.

maemo.org maintenance on Tuesday 2013-06-25 from 0700 to 0900 UTC

maemo.org will be experiencing temporary service interruptions on Tuesday 2013-06-25 from 0700 to approximately 0900 UTC while a new switch is installed.

Contemplation period begins for Hildon Foundation Board of Directors election

The nomination period for the Hildon Foundation Board of Directors election ended Friday last week. The final candidate list is: Ryan Abel, Andrew Flegg, Krzysztof Kuska, Rüdiger Schiller, Win7 Mac, and Craig Woodward. 6 candidates, assuming all 6 last through the contemplation period, are enough to elect a board of 5 members.

"The contemplation period runs from June 15th"

Aligning Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation Council

Last week, Joerg Reisenweber announced that the membership of the Maemo Community Council and the Hildon Foundation Council would change to accomodate the merger of both councils into a Unified Council:

"As I am sure you know by now the objective of the recent Referendum was to align HFC and MCC together, hence forming a Council with similar rules including a few tweaks to adjust to new practicalities; instead of being a Nokia conduit. This will allow the two bodies to be aligned for the current and any future term. Hildon Foundation will therefore be left with one Council and a Board of Directors. In future this shall result in a single election performed for the unified council. For the above to happen it is required that the elections for HFC and MCC members are to be the same. This unfortunately didn't happen and we are currently left with one different member in each body, out of the five."

sixwheeledbeast and Kash will still play a role in the decision making processes for the new Unified Council, and the unification of the two bodies should hopefully reduce confusion and unnecessary bureaucratic contortions.

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."

There are many facets to maemo.org's infrastructure, from the website itself (running on Midgard); Talk (running on vBulletin); the wiki (running on Mediawiki); Garage (home to many projects, including MWKN, running on GForge); the autobuilder and Extras (and the testing infrastructure for them) any many other aspects.

Despite facing a critical time at the moment, your editor expects the financial situation for maemo.org to be one of the ongoing stories of 2013.

maemo.org Talk donated to Hildon Foundation

With the other changes to the infrastructure, Reggie Suplido is stepping down as TMO administrator, and handing it over to the Hildon Foundation. In the announcement, Council, and Board, member Ivan Galvez Junquera said:

"The Internet Tablet Talk first and TMO later, have been the glue for this amazing community that we have, providing an efficient way of communication between developers and end users, not just a place for discussion and comments."

"Reggie has been the administrator and owner of forums since the very beginning, and thanks to him a lot has been accomplished. However, now that Nokia is stopping activities around Maemo and Meego, continuation of forums was at risk."

Reggie is stepping down as TMO administrator at the start of 2013, and is handing over the database to the Foundation. This means a new administrator is needed, and running costs managed by the more constrained finances.

The discussion also veered into open source replacements for the vBulletin system on which it currently runs. Although ultimately a sensible move, in your editor's opinion, now is not the time for that. At the moment, continuity of service is required whilst alternatives - and trusted people willing to put in the effort to perform the migration - are properly investigated and weighed up.

Nokia Store losing billing support on N9 in China

Talk user "rzr" reported on an email he received last week from Nokia: "Recently we are going to deploy an upgrade of store billing to improve the billing in China, but unfortunately as a side effect of this, we will lose billing support on N9, which means content on N9 can’t be billed in China anymore." If developers wish to continue shipping their Harmattan applications in China they'll need to publish them in free versions.

We'll likely be hearing more and similar stories like this over the coming months and years as Nokia's support for Harmattan really screetches to a halt.

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.

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.

Jolla reveal strategy, UI and Qt Creator-based SDK at Slush 2012

Jolla is once again foremost in the minds of many mobile OS enthusiasts and open-source aficionados with more information being revealed regarding their strategy and future. The launch of their official website and a slick video partway between a teaser and a product video give a definite sense of progress and should inspire confidence in everyone holding their breath for a product launch.

The developer story, as suspected, rests around Qt and QML with both Qt Mobility and QML being supported for native application development. Their Mer-based SailfishOS has a downloadable SDK available to anyone interested in compiling the Qt Creator-based offering (which your editor will be doing tonight).

The UI demonstration caught most of the attention, however. The impressive demo showed off a UX that will be familiar to any Harmattan user with swiping - described as "pushing" by the Jolla team - as the primary interaction theme with the device. The demoed UX showed swiping between multiple homescreens very similar to Harmattan, although oriented up/down instead of left/right and currently lacking a notifications screen. Of particular interest, the task switcher view features both reduced-information application previews (to provide information to the user while the application is not in the foreground), and the ability to interact with those applications using swipe gestures without having to bring the application into the foreground. The experience struck this editor as very fluid, intuitive, and fast. Jolla's implementation of swiping, much like Nokia's, seems a significantly more touch-appropriate interaction method than, what one blogger described as, "Apple and Google's gorilla-finger heavy approaches".

At least two of the demonstration videos available show Sailfish running on a Nokia N950. Although Jolla has no plans to release an image for the N9 and N950, it will be interesting to see what the community comes up with based on the available sources and SDK.

Introducing your new Maemo Community Council and first meeting minutes

The new Maemo Community Council introduced itself on the council blog last week with the minutes from their first council meeting: "First, greetings to everyone from your new Council members. As you all already might know, on the council for this term are: Alexander Kozhevnikov, Ivan Galvez Junquera, Joerg Reisenweber, Michael Demetriou, and Niel Nielsen. We look forward to serving you for the duration of our term. We will also keep posting the minutes of every meeting we hold, just as the last council did. Please do not hesitate to contact either of us with problems and/or concerns, and we will do our best to address them. Also, remember that the IRC room where community council meetings take place is open and you can always drop in when we hold the meetings (18 UTC, in #meeting-maemo on the FreeNode IRC network)."

Topics covered include the election of a chair (Alexander), a warranty issue with a coding competition winner's N950, infrastructure discussion, board-related updates, and various miscellaneous administrative tasks.

Open Letter from the Hildon Foundation Board

The newly elected Hildon Foundation Board have published an open letter to the community about the direction they have started to take. "At this point, the first Board meeting minutes have been published for public review. As we hope you'll see, it is nothing but the Maemo Community's best interests that we are concerned with. In fact, the entire reason for the Hildon Foundation to exist is so that the" The encouraging opening continues into a bit of the history behind the community starting with the community council and describing where the Hildon Foundation Board fits into the picture. The board maintains its roots, stating it will conduct business in "an open source manner" both in the board-specific meetings and communication with the community.

Getting Android Dalvik "Hello world" app running on Harmattan

Thomas Perl has been working on getting Android applications to run from within Harmattan using the Dalvik VM from Nitdroid. Thomas gives detailed instructions on how this was acheived and shows an example program running. He mentions in the comments that he is not really interested in taking the idea any further at this point, but gives some starting points in case someone wants to pick it up. The terms "chroot," "reflash," and "brick" are thrown around from time-to-time, so be sure you understand the risks and know what you are doing before you try this at home.

Hildon Foundation Board election results

The results of the inaugural Hildon Foundation Board election were released last week. The new 3-member board (which includes one of MWKN's own: Tim Samoff) will serve a one year term. Congratulations to your new Hildon Foundation Board!: "Winners are Ivan Galvez Junquera (ivgalvez), Randall Arnold (Texrat), and Tim Samoff (timsamoff)."

The election of the board marks the beginning of maemo.org's transition to an independent entity from Nokia as funding for maemo.org will come to a close at the end of the year. The new board will act as the governing body for the legal entity (Hildon Foundation) that will be taking over control of maemo.org. The new board members are in for a tough job. The staff of MWKN, being familiar with the sorts of challenges they're likely to face, wishes them good luck.

Proposed "release candidate" for non-profit Hildon Foundation by-laws

With maemo.org's service contract coming to a close at the end of the year, Nokia's support of the community will end. In a response to this, a non-profit organization, the Hildon Foundation, is being formed to take over operation of maemo.org and its services. The by-laws for the foundation have been undergoing a long process of writing and re-writing over the past two months, and Craig Woodward posted the latest revision to the proposed by-laws on Talk: "Attached find the next (possibly last?) proposed revision of the bylaws. There are several small changes (capitalization, word changes, typo fixes), and one major change around what happens with elections when nominees die or withdraw their nomination. [...] Please review these and get comments in fast!"

With the Hildon Foundation Board election results posted, the new board will likely be voting on the by-laws within the next week or two. Anyone interested in reviewing them before they're instated should do so as soon as possible.

Non-profit board elections underway, council nominations re-opened

The election for the Hildon Foundation Board opened this past week on Friday (October 12th) and will run through Thursday October 18th 2012, 23:59 UTC. For the board elections: "Due to Nokia's state, its funding for maemo.org in 2013 is uncertain. The community is working on bylaws for a new legal entity (currently with the working title “Hildon Foundation”) that can legally inherit the domain name or have donations (monetary, hardware and/or data) from Nokia, the current providers, and community members, which can be used to continue operation of resources vital to the community. The bylaws are currently in discussion, and will be formalized shortly. The initial Board for the Foundation will be elected parallel to, and with the same election rules and requirements as, those currently established for Council elections. It is expected that the Board elected for this new entity will adopt the community's desired bylaws and be ready to take the reigns as soon as the entity is ready for operation."

The nomination period for the Maemo Community Council has been extended through Sunday October 28th, 23:59 UTC. Voting for council will take place from November 2nd through the 8th.

Jolla to unveil Mer-based Sailfish OS and developer story next month

Last week Jolla announced it will be unveiling its new Sailfish OS, Jolla UI, and SDK at the Slush startup conceference in Helsinki November 21st and 22nd: "The startup, which is comprised of many former Nokia employees, said it will also discuss the Jolla SDK and app ecosystem with developers. 'Device information, ID and expected availability' will be announced before Christmas, it added. 'I’m thrilled to finally be able to show the user interface we have been working on, and it will be exciting to open the developer story with SDK and applications to the public,' said Jussi Hurmola, CEO of Jolla, in a statement."

The reveal of the platform and developer story will be the first major non-business announcement from Jolla, and will give developers a more meaningful picture of what the application story will look like for the platform. The reveal of the Jolla-specific UI differentiation will be our first look at what Jolla's "all new" UI will look like. The release of the SDK will hopefully drum up some excitement for the platform, and it will be interesting to see what sort of information the community manages to dig out about the hardware platform (an endeavor the Maemo community is very familiar with).

Jolla brands Mer-based MeeGo offshoot ecosystem as "Sailfish"

Last week, Jolla announced the formation of a strategic platform alliance around the newly-branded Mer-based Sailfish platform: "Finnish smartphone start-up Jolla will build a new mobile alliance which will license the MeeGo-based mobile operating system to other device manufacturers and service developers beginning spring 2013, according to Jolla CEO Jussi Hurmola. According to Hurmola, Jolla is currently building up a new 200 million euro mobile alliance based in Hong Kong, China. In the core of the alliance is the MeeGo based mobile operating system which Jolla calls "Sailfish"." No partners have been announced, and the €200 million isn't a particularly large number, but it will be exciting to see what sort of interest it manages to generate.

Management not-for-profit board and Community Council nomination period closes

The nomination period for the two concurrent elections have closed. The new "not-for-profit" organisation which will take over community ownership duties from Nokia has had six candidates declare their intention to stand:

* Randall Arnold

* Niel Nielsen

* Ivan Galvez Junquera

* Joerg Reisenweber

* Tim Samoff

* Craig Woodward.

There are three candidates for the Community Council, so they could replace the current council without the need for an election:

* Niel Nielsen

* Ivan Galvez Junquera

* Joerg Reisenweber

Si Howard is also standing for both bodies, but does not currently have a sufficient karma score; so is ineligible.