Community Matters

One of the hardest things for people to understand about MeeGo is the intersection between what wants to be a community distribution and what appears to be a distribution with a strong influence by its two major sponsors (Intel and Nokia).

In a community distribution the maintainers make the decisions. Today, in MeeGo those maintainers are employed by the corporate sponsors. So this causes confusion about who runs the project. No, it’s not the corporations. It’s the maintainers.

What can we do to fix that? Get maintainers that don’t work for Intel or Nokia. So as far as I’m concerned, this is our biggest challenge right now. Once we have a diverse set of maintainers the actions by the major corporations involved will no longer appear as the corporate overlords imposing their will, it will be significant contributions by major contributors. And that’s a much healthier view of things.