What I am grateful for is that the software is open source (one of the reasons I bought the phone).

This means if the community really wanted to we could fork our own version of maemo and maybe make our own compatible version.

That's one of the benefits of open source - a company can't hold you to ransom and force you to upgrade. At least you have the freedom to modify the software.

Nokia have done some great things with open source specifically LGPLing the QT library.

If maemo 6 in not officially ported to the n900 then maybe the community can try. The problem for developers is if Nokia make maemo 6 incompatible with maemo 5 then developers will yet again have to port their software over.