Maemo Community Council meeting outcomes

Via: @timoph

Editor: Andrew Flegg

On Tuesday, a Maemo Community Council meeting was held with the following agenda:

1.Welcome (back) to QGil/Update from Nokia(?)

2. Community OBS

3. Council Election voting

4. Left-over topics from last council meeting (if timely): A. Qt style license agreement for maemo; B. Co-maintainership for CSSU repo

Minutes have not been published, so here is our summary:

Attendees: Quim Gil (Nokia), RM Bauer (current council member); Craig Woodward (council candidate}; Niels Breet (Nemein); Joerg Reisenweber, Simon Pickering, Javier S. Pedro, martin brook, Ivaylo Dimitrov, RST38h, Andrew Flegg, itsnotabigtruck, Carsten Munk (Mer); David Greaves (Mer); Christian Ratzenhofer, Iván Gálvez Junquera (council candidate}.

The main points in the meeting were:

OBS: A proof-of-concept for Fremantle PR1.2 was "kind of working". There's a possibility for both technical and organisational collaboration with Mer. The motivation is to align, simplify and improve the maintainability of the infrastructure. A task force of volunteers has come forward to start documenting the proposed steps. Currently, COBS does not support external dependencies of projects, although this is a process restriction rather than technical (however, it is still a process which would need adapting). The proposal is "actually being driven by Mer proposal"; although your editor would note that there would need to be clarity between the aspects which were being paid for by Nokia (and what that covers) and those of the Mer project, and any entities involved. This is simplfied somewhat if Nokia are also contributing to the Mer project. The transition would be complicated. The benefits may only be realised if all of the current autobuilder can ultimately be switched off, freeing up resources.

Budget: Quim re-iterated that maemo.org's budgetting has not changed, it is funded until the end of 2012; after the summer, Nokia's budgets for the forthcoming period will be approved.

Apps For MeeGo: There may be greater alignment, including an onboard QA client, between maemo.org/packages, maemo.org Downloads and apps.formeego.org.

Licencing Nokia binaries: primarily the immediate problem is licensing them for the Community OBS; however, this could work in a similar way to the current autobuilder. The question of redistribution if Nokia were no longer willing or able to provide them was referred back to the budget question.

Co-maintainership of CSSU: It might be a good candidate for Fremantle on COBS, to avoid investment in maemo.org infrastructure which might be unused in future. The possibility of Nokia pushing an update to move people over to the CSSU was raised, but not fully dealt with.

Nemein: The current contract between Nokia and Nemein to "keep the servers up & secure". Quim will check with Nemein if the level of availability above and beyond that for project work.

Hopefully the next council will ensure the task of minuting meetings will be picked up ahead of time, as it's a key point in enabling transparency and getting more people involved.