I think the main difference is that in case of Maemo (and Sailfish OS) you have something that works and is actually day to day usable in most cases and with some rough edges here and there.

Basically, people are much more likely to help improve something that they can actually use, rather than something that while being completely open needs a substantial amount of work to get even remotely usable.

That (to reiterate for probably the hundredth time...) I think it was a big mistake not to make Sailfish OS fully open source (minus any third party licensed code of course) - it would get the Nemo mobile a working baseline (even if it had to replace Jollas trademarks, themes, etc.) on which it could then build its own specific initiatives, such as the Glacier UI.

And I'm sure it would also benefit Sailfish OS as many of the changes made by Nemo based contributors would be directly usable by Sailfish OS, it would also definitely help the reputation in the open source community and overall you want as many people as possible to use even your pre release software to spot possible bugs as early as possible.

I still hope that the possible dual licensing deal proposed by Stskeeps on the latest community meeting(described ~ in the middle of the article) comes through - even though it is certainly not something easy to do given the current situation.

Still, if the open sourcing can be done, the scenario described above might still happen at last.