I was ecstatic about the new non-beta, let's call it Technology Preview of the SIP and Gecko integration this week. I am currently running both and loving them. They are exactly what I like to see from unreleased software.

* Is the Mozilla engine fast? No.
* Slow? No, just not as fast as Opera
* Is it perfect? No, it crashes once in a while.

* Is the SIP client good? Yes!
* Is it perfect? I doubt it, but I can make and receive calls from my home VOIP service. Stellar!
Personal aside: SIP is THE killer app for me on this device.

The most important part of this is that they are starting to *get* community based development. They are sending out code that is operable and pretty good, before we have to wait months for a whole new release. Quim, on the list is giving us insight as to the development process. It was not too long ago where almost all questions Quim and Nokia would respond to were of the form "We can not disclose current or future features". Now this may not be all of Quim's doing, but I give a big Thank You to him for taking our barbs, while working within Nokia to get them to start doing the right thing. This stuff may not seem hard to us, but Quim summed it up well in a recent post: http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/2007-July/011000.html

For large companies you need to make a business case for every choice. This is hard, I have seen MANY companies fail at defining the biz case for giving away code. Remember, a biz case needs a real return on investment, not just zero cost. 3rd party developers in a code base is a strong liability.

Anyway good job Quim and the rest of the team in making the biz cases, but more importantly getting this stuff out. So where is BT audio? :)