Thank you for opening this thread as a more specific part of the problem abill_uk is pursuing.

Well the reason is as you put it at the other place:
"I did not do my homework"

Seriously, I've made extreme effort to obtain 770 ( I bought it in Berlin) since at that time I really thought it was the platform the Nokia Champions (you know those guys with fancy blogs, nice glasses, traveling around, giving lectures, being mostly silent or defensive now) branded as open source.

The flash and similar third party garbage was not of interest to me. You know, nobody bothered to tell us: there are some closed source bits.
So I've decided not to develop anything for a closed platform, and used it since as common consumer.

I've bought N810 because I had to replace 770, and nothing on the market was close to the form factor and features. It was already considered obsolete by many, since the maemo5 talks have started.

When your Mer project appeared I was hopping to join it, but it ended before that.

So that is the short sad story.

Now, I do have the worthy alternatives, but prefer to keep my n810 in working condition as long as possible.

Having OSS drivers would be great in order to have other distros instead of aging maemo.

The additional interest is to bring the topic to be noticed by the people who are being "teased".