Maemo is probably about as open as Android (and is less open than OpenMoko) when you consider bundled applications. Perhaps half of the libraries and most of the applications are closed. Maybe I’m pessimistic, but I remember my original joy (hey, the 770 runs an open-source OS) and disappointment (crap, half of the stuff is proprietary).

There’s also Mer, which takes the open bits of Maemo and tries replace the proprietary bits to get a complete distro.

@2: I didn’t ever say I made a deep analysis, I just noted that Maemo, which is supposed to be more open than Android, comes with installer scripts which contain a pretty strict copyright notice by Nokia. The bug reporting point is good though, going to report one after finishing to respond to your comment.

However, I did not find the page both you and #1 are mentioning. I went straight to maemo.org, clicked on downloads and fremantle on the lower right which took me straight to http://www.forum.nokia.com/Tools_Docs_and_Code/Tools/Platforms/Maemo/. No mention of alternative install methods there.

If you would have paused for a moment and looked at the table of contents of the SDK installation guide and you would have noticed the chapter titled “Manual Installation”, which describes how to install the SDK without any script nor proprietary stuff.

And of course, if you actually bothered to report a bug complaining about the license of the script I’m sure it would be changed in a heartbeat.

But I guess making a compelling argument in your blog is more important than showing the reality.

For reasons why there are closed packages, see http://wiki.maemo.org/Why_the_closed_packages.