Who said that open source has to be openly developed?

You might say it goes against openness and the community to do that and for certain projects I agree.

we both know from experience now what open community development does for a large project and its not pretty.

Gan, for a personal example, think about the nightmares you had about app categories, and multiply them 1000 times.

Being secretive and developing behind closed doors allows a group to focus on the vision and spec without ending up with a stinking pile of committee driven code.

sure, at the end of a cycle the code produced still might not satisfy a hungry crowd, but it fulfilled the original design objectives and tick all the right boxes.
The alpha and beta stages are meant to facilitate discussions about changes in direction.

I believe the same goes for hardware, but the "community" cannot really do most of the alpha and beta testing, but I'm sure some folks have done already and will continue to in the future.


as for the dead hardware, I certainly don't think its dead and as community council member for maemo.org general thats a pretty harsh thing to say.