People should remember this announcement which said:

"This early release comes with an invitation to build variants based on Maemo 5 compatible with existing hardware like the N800 and N810. Maemo SW can't promise commercial quality for such configurations but through maemo.org we are able to collaborate at a community level with technical support, license changes and code."

Our hybris was also that we wanted to start out with a fully open source base instead of cutting corners with closed source things. Also, we went in directions that made us incompatible with Maemo5 for some things as well. So in some ways, in all the organisation build-up and hacking day after day, we forgot to remember about the goal - having a usable OS by the user. In practice, we didn't ask for that much relicensing and those we asked for, we got.

But the invitation still stands, I'd say. If we needed recompiles, I'm sure it would be possible to work it out somehow - especially with my role as distmaster now.