I welcome the moves to make Maemo more open, but it’ll take quite a while still before outside developers can feel like they can participate. As long as it’s a closed platform, I might as well direct my attention and efforts to more popular and complete closed platforms like the iPhone.

I’ll try to be more constructive, and maybe suggest a few things which might help us take an interest in Maemo again:
- open hardware – the 770 for instance is still without WLAN drivers
- better software stack (UI/3D/Multimedia/…) – that’s where Fremantle comes in I suppose
- what @foo said: a distro like approach. It would be nice if there was one distro for all, and that over time improvements are automatically available to all (without reflashing of course). Outside developers would be able to deliver software without having to worry about dependencies (“will our soft run on Gregale/Bora/Chinook 770/800/810/…?”)
- the distro approach would also allow outside developers to take up responsability for a (small?) set of packages and actually get involved. Right now it seems non-Nokians have very little input on the direction and roadmap of Maemo. It all has a Deus-ex-machina feel to it, that the unwashed masses should be grateful for. Participating with Openmoko, Openembedded, Angstrom, etc might also really pay off.

Sorry for ranting (too much text already – I’ll stop now, promise ^_^)

I hope that we can have more software and options for our tPC

Good Job, Congrats

Unfortunately we’ve heard it all so many times before from Nokia – “Release early, release often” – but it’s never happened to date which has left the community operating in a boom & bust mode, lurching from one release to another every 6 months or so, generally with a sense of disappointment at the lack of any real progress (particularly in terms of UI) apparent in each release.

If you can get alpha builds out to us that we can install on our devices – ideally without trashing an existing Diablo Release installation (ie. Freemantle alphas should install to external Flash memory with support for multi-boot, thus coexisting with a Diablo installation) then your feedback will go through the roof and Nokia can avoid the mistakes that have blighted previous releases.

In addition the increased openness will see more developers willing to participate in improving the alpha builds, assuming patches will be accepted by Nokia. The recent announcements sound good, let’s see if the execution can match it.