In theory, this move to a completely open source system is great news. But I swear I've only heard one shoe drop. So I'll keep listening...

I think the primary strength of Maemo is maemo.org, the community. There really seems to be no (amateur) community over at moblin.org, and I will be quite upset if we lose that in the merge.

But I'll talk about that more in the other thread.

The biggest technical problem for me is the move from Debian to Fedora...

It seems to me that Easy Debian will be even more useful in the MeeGo future, because Moblin and Fedora have historically had a tiny application list available for ARM processors. Up until very very recently, Fedora's ARM repositories could be charitably considered "experimental". Debian, on the other hand, pretty much compiled the entire Lenny distribution for ARM. Ubuntu got there with Karmic, too.

So, having access to the ARM-friendly Debian and Ubuntu repositories is going to become even more important as the primary system aligns with Intel-centric Fedora instead.

I will have to learn, like all the other hackers and developers who have been chasing the Maemo car around as it makes its sudden, wild turns, how to make packages for the new system, and how to deal with the numerous "eccentricities" that MeeGo (and the Maemo "instances" of MeeGo) will introduce. You just have to think of it as a steeplechase, and then it is fun again.