Nokia <-> MeeGo community communication thread

In order to help dispell some of the FUD surrounding the recent news, Quim Gil has started a new topic on the MeeGo community forum to facilitate communication about the changes: I thought it would be useful to have this thread as a channel of communication between Nokia employees working in the MeeGo project and the MeeGo community. This way we can have a useful dialog in the grey area between Nokia official announcements (in Nokia contexts or in meego.com by Valtteri Halla) and pure MeeGo project discussions (at meego-community or other MeeGo channels). The thread covers Nokia's MeeGo teams continued effort to ship the Harmattan device and the scope and delivery of MeeGo-Harmattan, amongst other items.

Nokia's Quim Gil doesn't expect maemo.org funding to be immediately affected

maemo.org provides a wide range of complex services (repositories, a forum, a wiki, bugzilla, social news, etc.) for owners of Maemo devices. The infrastructure for these services is complex and likely expensive (particularly the global caching network for the repositories). The aftershocks from the Elopocalypse have caused many to wonder what maemo.org's status will be in Nokia's future, as its focal platform is already twice the loser for Nokia's affections. Although Quim Gil doesn't have any concrete information on the issue (few people outside of Nokia's upper management do), he has this to say: Honestly, I don't expect the maemo.org budget to be just cut off from one day to another without any option to have a transition. Then again, that maemo.org budget comes from the MeeGo R&D team at Nokia, and you have heard that there is an ongoing optimization of R&D resources, so who knows. If I'm being asked, I think my best recommendation (read compromise proposed) will be to keep the funding 6 months in order to give the community time to react without panic. Contingency plans (including donation- or ad-supported site funding) are under discussion if Nokia does decide to pull the plug.

Community: Proposal for "<X>, a MeeGo R&D project" branding

Carsten Munk has proposed a new variation of use for the "MeeGo" trademark; to allow use for projects which might not yet be ready, but are intended to complement MeeGo: The current MeeGo compliance program only deals with final products and does contain any policy dealing with in-progress projects. This harms development in the open that would otherwise be motivated by the MeeGo project.

The idea of this proposal is to establish an allowed use of the MeeGo trademark for typical public R&D purposes while still maintaining an indicated connection to the MeeGo project.

It is understood that at the same time it should be made it clear to a user that a compliant MeeGo experience is not to be expected. This would apply both to commercial and to community driven projects. Examples given for uses include community adaptation projects such as those to Android devices. If successful, it could even extend to "core contributors" R&D efforts, such as Intel's Tablet UX.