Absolutely untrue. Maemo is a Debian derivative in the same way Ubuntu is. They are not bound by Debian policy, no.. but it is counterproductive and expensive to stray far from mainline. Of course it will happen, but the fact is 90% of Maemo is simply Debian, plus Nokia software, patches and configuration. It's the same way with the kernel. Very few people use Linux-proper; they use a kernel provided by their vendor. But it's still Linux. It's still 99.9% mainline, and each new version that's released is repatched, recertified, and released. The further from mainline, the more work it is for the vendor. And as someone quite experienced with both APT/dpkg and up2date/RPM (admittedly not yum), both from a user and developer's perspective, I respectfully disagree that they're equal.