Tell me, when the Allies took governance of German territories after WW2, was that permanent? When you elect a governor (governance is the act of governing), are they elected or appointed to that position for life? In most democratic countries, when a group or individual is given governance over something, it's term often at the whim of the resource owner, and is by definition temporary.
Can you show me even a single example of where governance of a system was given to a group of people for all time, and not rescinded?
That's all fine and good. The problem is MeeGo is not GPL, at least not the parts we're talking about. The drivers and bobbles we're talking about here are under NDA, and are NOT under GPL nor any other open license. That's what this whole discussion is about! Were the drivers and misc bits open-source and GPL, I'd be all behind this in a second. It's not, and probably never will be.
That's great. Tell me, how do you use a browser, email and IM when your wifi driver won't stay connected to an APN? Again, we were talking about the base OS here, not every app ever made for it. And despite Microsofts efforts to try to make it so, a web browser is not part of an OS.
Yes and no... I was comparing it to the model as it exists now. Tell me, do you think the governance council here (freshly elected) has any voice with Nokia now? Many past council members have said they barely had a voice when it was the big thing. I'd be surprised if they can get someone at Nokia to answer an email for them now...
How so? If it's open source, completely open, one can make a complete copy of it and retain it for their own use. The original presenter can in fact go away, or shut down the service/site promoting it. But if others have valid complete copies, how then can it be stopped?
The "resource" I'm talking about in this case IS source. Once that's out, there's little one can do to "govern" it, outside of garnering respect from the community and using political sway to guide it. (Linus T. being a pure example of that.) The fact that we're talking about governance means we're talking about a closed resource, virtual or tangible, that has limited availability. Until that availability status changes, that resource, and it's governance, can be revoked by the "owner" at will.
MeeGo has several closed bits still, which is what we're talking about here. Nobody is talking about "governance" of Mozilla on MeeGo. It's a moot point, as it's completely open. The governance is around how the closed parts are managed, and the general structure of the system as a whole. Both of which could be pulled back in at will by the collective corporations that hold the key bits to make it work on their devices.