To what end? It's like trying to get Amiga developers to "help out" this wonderful new project called Windows back in the 80s. Sure, it may never actually run stably on the Amiga hardware, but that's not the goal! Wait, what is the goal? To suck away developers from the initial platform? I'm not sure I like that!

The goal you're touting (as I see is) is to pull people off of the platform I'm using, that's vibrant, active, and starting to really show off what it can do, and into another that has no real future for the current hardware. For what?

Especially given that it's not even guaranteed at this point that anyone is going to make a MeeGo-based device. There's been lots of talk, tons of announcements, but we're 6 months into 2011, and even Nokia looks like they may be back-tracking now. Not to mention a complete lack of any vendor talking about doing phone support, outside of maybe LG on one device. Nokia has been quite mum on weather it's only announced MeeGo offering will have any GSM capabilities.

I don't think I could get most people here to agree on what the color "blue" is, yet alone what the goals here have been over the past 5 years. To say they've "always been clear" is farcical. More so seeing as a good number on the forum are here because of the N900, which was less tablet and more of a cross-over device.

Yes, creating an open tablet platform has been a key part of this forum. I can see how MeeGo is a natural continuation of that in the minds of some people, especially the N700/800 crowd. I can even see the desire to get people excited about it and get them to jump the shark and start working on the next big thing. But you shouldn't do so using false pretenses, which is exactly what you're doing when touting MeeGo on N900, while saying you never intend to see it for casual users.

If the N900 is never going to run on MeeGo as primary OS, via a simple update/reflash procedure for common people, then it's wasted effort. Better to put the time and energy into something useful, like getting the Calendar to sync with on-line services, or Contacts to not crash the device randomly. (Those are active bugs too, but I'm too lazy to link them right now.) Pouring time and energy into a single device that's never going to be run by more than a handful of developers, used to make apps for... who again? Who's going to use the things they make? Not N900 owners, if the target is only getting developers on to it.

To the contrary, it has been said and proven to some degree. It is open in that as a developer you can take the core, add the bits and bobbles for your hardware, and toss it on just about anything. As long as you don't care about continued development, or have a few people to manage upstream code merges on occasion, it's just as open as MeeGo. How many device manufacturers have picked up Android? How many have picked up Maemo? Which is more open? Again, it's all mixed... none of it is totally open, and claims of one being "more open" than the other often are blurred by the perspective of the person making that judgment.

<SNARK>
Besides, ask any Android user and they'll tell you, it's all open-source! They can do whatever you want on their Android phone, no really. Until you ask them to plug in a USB stick, and serve data from it to a laptop, while acting as both a web server and an AP hotspot... Because no phone can do that... Until yours can. But then you're just "showing off" with your "geeky phone". Not that I've ever done that...