Intel is dropping the Moblin brand in favor of MeeGo, yes. So is doing Nokia for anything beyond Maemo 5.

Moblin going through a rebranding exercise? Put yourself in the feet of a Moblin contributor:

- You now get a UI framework based on Qt.
- The API is also Qt based. GTK+ and Clutter APIs available but not in the driver seat anymore.
- A Web Runtime maintained by Nokia will land as well.
- The 'pocketable' form factor and 'finger friendly' use cases go from 'basically futuristic' to 'big part of the deal'.
- You just happen to be in a platform that supports ARM as well, opening the door right now to the "mobile phone" crew.
- More to come when the MeeGo architecture is explained in detail.

There hasn't been any source code "released" so far. Indeed, what you have seen is a provisional post-Moblin configuration. Please wait for a first release (or at least a detailed platform description) to judge the MeeGo stack. Please also wait for the day there is an ARM configuration as well.

The OBS comes from OpenSUSE, best in class. Moblin adopted it, Mer adopted it, MeeGo adopts it as well. Maemo didn't have any public build infra so the move makes sense.

About developers, Moblin developers already worked in the public so for them the change is big but still they were already working and discussing outside. Most MeeGo developers from Nokia (Harmattam developers, if you know what I mean) are still working inside Nokia, in many cases on components of the MeeGo architecture that haven't been announced publicly. I guess everything will be much easier for them once the Harmattan alpha release is out (working to release on 1Q, as promised).

Still, the amount of Nokia and Intel developers that have shown up visibly in MeeGo is very small compared to the real size of both teams. Also no wonder, there hasn't been too much to discuss for the majority of them, unless you want to be the NNth person engaging in a deb/rpm discussion.

Your measure of people showing up on IRC or adding themselves to a wiki page should completed by active participants in meego-dev, though. There I have seen posts from Kate Alhola, Alexander Bokovoy, Felipe Contreras, Thiago Maceira, Ville Vainio, and Marius Vollmer, among other nokians non-developers. There are also several developers that are not Nokia employees but they work full time on Nokia projects (I'm not even including the maemo.org team here). The Maemo development is just probably more distributed in term of companies and email suffixes than Moblin development.

My conclusion: MeeGo is rebrand and rebirth for both projects. For plenty of platform developers is mostly about rebranding and more syncing with other teams. For most application developers and users is a full next step, no matter where you come from.

Actually the Maemo crew got used already to the Qt horizon (and Web Runtime, for those who cared until now). For the average Moblin developer the change is a big sudden disruption.