First page Back Continue Last page Overview Text

Notes:


The home of the Maemo Community is maemo.org. Originally started as Nokia's own home for the Maemo project, it evolved in response to people getting involved until, in 2008, Nokia handed over the reins to the community. But this doesn't mean they're no longer involved: they pay for the hosting, the servers and many Nokia employees are very very active members of the community - both in the day job, and when they get home at night. The fact that the platform enthuses the people in a corporation as large as Nokia, and that many of them don't treat it as a nine-to-five job, is a source of continual surprise and delight to me.

And there are so many ways we can collaborate through maemo.org, whether it's in the discussion fora; providing and commenting on end-user applications; raising bugs against Nokia and third-party software. Indeed, maemo.org is so open that it's even home to the development efforts of a project called "Mer" - a community-driven attempt to re-architect Maemo around an entirely open source base, and provide continued support to existing devices.

Nokia also pays for the salaries of four full-time employees – or "paid contributors". They each have a role, whether it's webmaster, bug tracking co-ordinator, documentation or helping developers package and deploy applications. As they work on behalf of the community, the community has also been responsible for the hiring of the most recent recruit. Nokia said "find someone you want, tell us who they are, and we'll pay 'em".