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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

There's a pmOS effort to make the N900 hardware usable with modern kernel:

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Nokia_N900_(nokia-n900)

There was also a project to replace the hardware:

When trying out various Linux handheld options before pmOS, I wasn't able to get N900 hardware at a good price, but I did get a few N810 units. Then I was dismayed to find that a lot of the once-public open source and tools for N810 had simply been removed from the Internet. That kind of thing is another reason to support efforts like pmOS.

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> a lot of the once-public open source and tools for N810 had simply been removed from the Internet

Nokia insisted in hosting everything themselves, and obsessed with maintaining control of the platform while trying to "do opensource right" on some philosophical level. IIRC it resulted in a constant struggle with the community on really stupid issues, which dragged down the overall development speed. And then they pivoted to the Intel partnership just like that, from one day to the next, which meant jettisoning a massive amount of effort from the community (deb to rpm, effectively abandoning Qt, etc).

It was really a strange relationship. They kept writing rivers of (digital) ink on their love for OSS and blablabla, but then took all major decisions behind closed doors.

Interesting. I wasn't involved at the time, and, when I went trying to reconstruct the open source afterwards, I suspected the ill-fated Microsoft deal might've had something to do with it. But sounds like there were problems before then.

A lot of cross-organization open source projects have had trouble figuring out how to to do that. I think our collective understanding of this improved even within the last few years (e.g., community development processes like Rust's).

(Though it's not necessarily monotonic improvement: we might also be forgetting things that people used to know -- repeating mistakes that were already learned the hard way, and also making new mistakes that were easier for an earlier community foresee and avoid at the time.)

Another nice OS for the N900 is Maemo Leste (https://leste.meamo.org), which is basically the same software as ran originally, but modernized; sadly, when I last tried it, it still lacked a GUI for key features like calls and texts.

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