The community record
The Maemo community was the body of developers, testers, translators and users who did the work around Nokia’s Debian-based tablet platform between 2005 and roughly 2015, organised around maemo.org and its wiki, bug tracker, package repositories and forum, and it outlasted the platform by more than a decade because the platform was cancelled twice and the people were not.
That is the whole point of this page. Most of what is remembered about Maemo as a product was decided in Espoo; almost everything that is still usable about it was made by people who were not paid to make it. The record of that work is scattered now, but it is not gone.
Where the Maemo community actually lived
The Maemo community lived at maemo.org, which Nokia set up in 2005 alongside the 770 Internet Tablet and which was unusual for a phone manufacturer in that it was a genuine developer site rather than a marketing page with an SDK attached. Six things ran there, and they are worth naming separately because people looking for old material usually want exactly one of them:
- The wiki, which held the device documentation, the flashing guides and the accumulated how-to material
- The bug tracker, a Bugzilla instance where community-reported defects sat next to Nokia’s own
- The Garage, a project hosting service in the SourceForge mould, with version control and file releases
- The repositories, Extras and its two staging tiers, which distributed community packages
- The downloads catalogue, which presented those packages to non-developers with ratings and screenshots
- Planet Maemo, the aggregator that pulled in the personal blogs of the developers
The forum sat slightly apart from all of it and is treated separately in The forums, because its history runs on a different track: it started as an independent site in 2005 and was folded into maemo.org later.
How a package reached the Extras repository
A package reached the Extras repository by climbing three tiers, and the mechanism deserves description because very few platforms before or since have had anything like it. Anyone could publish to extras-devel, which was explicitly a place where things were expected to break. Promotion from there was a community decision, not a company one:
- Upload the source to the autobuilder, which produced the binary package for extras-devel
- Request promotion to extras-testing once the package was believed to work
- Collect votes from community testers, who installed it and scored it against published criteria
- Reach the threshold, at which point the package moved into Extras and became visible to ordinary users
- Accept demotion, if enough testers reported that it broke something
The result was a distribution channel run on peer review rather than on either a corporate gatekeeper or nothing at all. It was slow, it produced arguments, and it kept a genuinely dangerous class of package away from users who would not have known how to recover the device. The tiering also explains why so many old forum threads say “in devel” or “still in testing”: those were meaningful states, not figures of speech.
What the community built that Nokia did not
The community built the parts of the platform Nokia had no commercial reason to build, and on The Nokia N900 it eventually built the maintenance too. The clearest example is the Community SSU, a volunteer-maintained update channel for Maemo 5 that carried on after Nokia’s final official release, PR1.3, in October 2010. It fixed bugs, backported components and kept the system installable for years after the vendor had stopped, on a device with a full Debian-style package archive that made such a thing technically possible in the first place.
Beyond that there were thousands of packages, ports and custom builds: a native mapping application after Nokia’s own stopped being updated, media players, terminal and development tooling, alternative desktops, and the long tail of ports that exists whenever a device has a real toolchain. Community members ran their own elected body, the Maemo Community Council, from 2008, and after Nokia’s withdrawal the running of maemo.org itself passed to a community organisation, the Hildon Foundation, which is why the site did not simply vanish when the sponsor did.
The platform was cancelled twice
The platform was cancelled twice within nineteen months, and the second cancellation is the one that mattered. On 15 February 2010, at Mobile World Congress, Nokia and Intel announced that Maemo and Intel’s Moblin would merge into MeeGo, which ended Maemo as a name and required every application developer to move to a new packaging format and a new release cadence. On 11 February 2011 Nokia announced that Windows Phone would be its primary smartphone platform, which ended MeeGo at Nokia; in September 2011 Intel and the Linux Foundation announced Tizen, which ended MeeGo everywhere else. The one MeeGo handset Nokia shipped, the N9, went on sale in the same months its platform was being closed down.
What happened next is the thing worth recording. The core was forked and continued as Mer, a community project restarted in 2011. A user interface project, Nemo Mobile, grew on top of it. A Danish developer, Carsten Munk, wrote libhybris in 2013, which allowed a glibc-based Linux userland to use Android device drivers, and that single piece of engineering is the reason community ports to Android hardware became possible at all. Jolla, formed by ex-Nokia staff, built Sailfish OS on Mer and shipped it commercially. None of that was planned by anyone with a budget.
Where the same community is now
The same community now works mostly in the Sailfish orbit rather than the Maemo one, and it does roughly the same jobs under different names. Unofficial ports of Sailfish OS to Android handsets are produced by individual porters using the Hardware Adaptation Development Kit, published on the Sailfish OS forum, and installed by people prepared to unlock a bootloader; they carry the open middleware but not the proprietary Android application layer, which stays with the commercial licence. Community repositories, OpenRepos.net and later Chum, do what Extras did. Bug reports, feature requests and survey threads run on the Sailfish forum. Jolla’s community phone exists because that group of users exists.
| Function | Maemo years | Sailfish years |
|---|---|---|
| Discussion | talk.maemo.org | forum.sailfishos.org |
| Community packages | Extras, extras-testing, extras-devel | OpenRepos.net, Chum |
| Bug tracking | maemo.org Bugzilla | Jolla’s bug tracking and the forum |
| Unofficial builds | Community SSU for Maemo 5 | Community ports built with the HADK |
| Developer writing | Planet Maemo | Individual blogs and forum posts |
What survives and what does not
What survives is more than most people expect and less than the community deserved. maemo.org is still online and the old forum threads are still readable, which means a fifteen-year-old link to a bug report or a how-to often still resolves. What does not survive reliably is everything that depended on a live service: package downloads that pointed at repositories which have moved, image hosts that closed and took the screenshots with them, and dead links to project pages on hosting services that no longer exist. The rule of thumb is that text survived and binaries did not.
This is an independent reference. It is not maemo.org, not Nokia, not Jolla and not the news blog that occupied this domain between 2009 and 2015. It hosts no firmware, no operating system images and no repackaged applications, and it does not mirror anyone’s forum posts: where the original is still readable, the original is the thing to read.