While I basically agree with you, I have to say it's frequently maemo's middleware that's our problem. We got working replacements for battery charging (you noticed lately even backupmenu comes with charging?), what's missing are the interfaces to the higher levels, like hal-addon-bme to tell hal and thus whole system about battery state. Same for modem: we got semi-decent specs of the lowest-level interface, but we can't fix any bug in the higher levels of the stack (buzzword cell broadcast messages), nor implement an own dialer, unless we're going to replace 30% of maemo same time, as everything is linked to everything.
For general statement of "no other distro can run on N900" see e.g. SHR (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywkWb...eature=related comes with charging, and now also calls with audio in a beta state)

@stskeeps: how about inofficial out-of-major-release-turn bugfixes of single binaries then? Esp if they have a clearly traced down bug, that probably would need less than a man-hour to fix, given you've access to sources. Then inofficially "release" the binary and leave it up to community to do the evaluation and integration (can be done in cssu)
How about stupid plain header files that often come even without GPL as nobody really cares and never would deem them worth any (C)? Same procedure, push to $RANDOM, "leak" a URL to $RANDOM. No responsibility whatsoever for Nokia. Community will cheer.

Anyway thanks for bringing a bit of sense to this debate.
An occasional
request: open foo source
required for: bar
maintainer of request: Mr. X
estimated manpower: 2 manweeks to process and clean sources
Estimated state of lawyer queue: 9..18months
prognosis: in 9,5 months unlikely to help, in 18months obsolete
conclusion: suggest to request origin to go for BAR instead, XY could provide help
---
don't you think this would help a lot to feed us with some common sense about what's really up, and thus would help avoiding a lot of the high temperature that's arising from those issues seemingly getting completely ignored?

cheers
/jOERG