This week's Community Office meeting primarily dealt with IT (and, in particular, who owns communicating and coordination of the weekend OBS outages) and the apps.meego.com "debacle". The politics around David Greaves's reveal of the problems are interesting, and seem to indicate that the manner in which this was made visible to the community have caused problems for some.
Lucas Maneos found the logs of a meeting between the Maemo Community Council (represented by RM Bauer), Nokia (Matti Airas) and Niels Breet. Topics discussed include Extras-testing QA requirements, hosting status and budgets and the long-term direction of maemo.org. Some highlights:
Something like the Fedora Project or Python Foundation is being considered... subject to community vote next month; for continuation and migration to other devices. we will probably limit ourselves to CSSU and Cordia, same time, have a mission statement broad enough that we can work with formeego folks if they choose. right now, maemo.org activities are hardly organized.
In reality, the servers will stay on until 31-12-2012.
In an "Ask the Council!" thread on maemo.org, "jedi" calls attention to an application being distributed through maemo.org that contained more than a few GPL violations:
Just one example (of many): Contained in the 'app' is the Bash binary. The GPL states that if you are going to redistribute GPL code, you must make the source of your app available.
He was hosting the app on Sourceforge, but it was removed from there - possibly due to me reporting it.
He has repeatedly refused to make the source available.
It is unclear in this case if the violations were intentional, but when the author was informed of them and asked to comply with the license and release the source code he allegedly refused. Licensing is an important thing to keep in mind when developing Open Source software and is often overlooked by application developers.