I really don't understand why HP didn't join the Meego effort a year ago, both they and Nokia would have won out of that. Regardless of whether they were actually being built from Meego, or were just compliant enough (surely that wouldn't have been too hard, WebOS is close enough in some terms to Meego) to mean that developers could confidently develop for Meego and target WebOS, Harmattan and vanilla Meego, it would at least have given a multi-vendor ecosystem a chance.

Once they saw there was a viable ecosystem, reducing the costs and accelerating time to market by merging into vanilla Meego would have made sense.