Major, and avoidable, recent mistakes from Nokia
Randall Arnold, one of our Maemo Community Council representatives, has post a new blog article outlining his view on many of the missteps Nokia has made with Maemo recently. The release of MeeGo 1.0 was accompanied by some resolution to Maemo, not all of it with positive consequences. The long-awaited PR1.2 update was officially released at around the same time, which was a welcome relief, but excitement over the improvements it brought were tempered by less-than-genius developments.There's an unfortunate legacy of dropped balls in the Maemo closet, usually involving operating system evolutions so rough that they evoked more feelings of abandonment than joy. I'm not going to rehash all of the legacy, but will instead focus on this year. Dealing with issues such as Harmattan branding, lack of communication at a corporate level and the privacy-busting "MyNokia" SMS (amongst others), Randall clearly lays out some of most eye-watering mistakes which could've been avoided.
The community discussion on talk.maemo.org is interesting, and is summarised later in this issue.
Despite MeeGo, is Nokia getting more closed?
In addition to Randall's list above, a number of senior (that is, old ;-)), maemo.org community members are expressing similar thoughts about openness, Nokia and MeeGo. Amongst others, Stephen Gadsby, Ryan Abel, Attila Csipa, Faheem Pervez, Andrew Flegg, benny1967 and Reggie Suplido have all expressed some form of disappointment with how things seem to be going. Mostly, the feeling of general malaise can be focused around two points: a feeling of having the collective wisdom of the last 5 years of Maemo be ignored with the focus on MeeGo and the "big reveal" mentality for something as fundamental of the basis of the handset UI (bugs which included screenshots of the UI have now been locked down). Stephen expresses it as eloquently as ever: MeeGo is still too much in the shadows, running silent and deep. Nokia dropped Elephanta as too small a step and rushed Fremantle out to hold everyone over during the wait for Harmattan, but these repeated waits for the next big, double-secret thing have worn the community's goodwill thin in a growing number of spots. Stephen also points out that the activity of Nokians in the community has reduced over the last five years, after a peak in around 2008. Familiar names like ragnar, Igor Stoppa and Eero Tamminen are seen a lot less frequently these days. People are busy, this is understood - of course; however if things take (say) a week longer, but you carry the community with you, isn't that a price worth paying?
Two of the names above are your editors; but this growing feeling is being expressed increasingly frequently.