One of the reasons I bought the n900 was because it is open source and runs linux.

I am really happy with my n900 and it will have years of use.

However, I think Nokia has underestimated how popular the n900 had become and probably having trouble allocating resources to support this device. Especially while they are developing the next version of Maemo.

Their best bet is to continue with Maemo 6 and maybe scale-down the amount of changes to the platform. They can still release another Maemo-based device & make sure it is compatible with new MeeGo.

Ideally make Maemo-6 available for the n900.

Today's developers can write software on the n900 that should be binary compatible with Maemo-6 (ideally MeeGo too). When MeeGo is ready developers have an easy upgrade path for thier applications and the application pool should grow.
Then Nokia will start to have a healthy application catalogue and become a serious competitor to Android and iPhone.

The MeeGo development must of kicked-off months ago - I don't think this happened overnight. Nokia should have had an idea where they are going with Maemo and develop it towards MeeGo.

Of course, all this is speculation and may never happen and possibly the n900 will be abandoned.

But you know what? That's entirely up to Nokia and fine by me.

The n900 and it's software is open-source. I'm not tied to one vender hoping the software will be upgraded - we have the community to help with that.

The Mer project is shaping-up pretty well, moblin/MeeGo is open source or maybe someone will install a custom-version of some other linux distrobution.

The n900 is an open source device (apart from a few exceptions e.g. phone) and means it will have a long useful life ahead of it - I don't need to rely on the support of a corporation to develop for it.

I'm not locked-in to anybody.

It used to bother me that Nokia were going to exclude the n900 in official supoort for Maemo 6 and the lack of the free version of OVI maps that's fine. The community are developing alternate mapping applications and there is active development of Mer.

So, if things go well with the merge of Maemo and Moblin then great we reap the benefits of that.

If Nokia & Intel somehow mess things up (e.g. Intel commits Nokia to Moblin then Intel walk away with thier own idea - a tactic much used by Microsoft) we still reap the benefits because the community steps in.

It will be interesting to see what develops.