You're right - Mer never ended up being finished. We started out as a research project and we ended as one. A lot of us who were involved ended up having a lot of knowledge of how a mobile system is put together, how to develop such a system in the open, etc. I'm sure there's a lot of people who will go on record to say the same. Some of us are even doing Maemo/MeeGo professionally now. Training ground for recruits, some might say

I'm sorry for the project ADHD I've caused. My professional life and plans regarding Mer certainly got thrown into the air when MeeGo came about. I discussed this in the post-mortem of Mer as an idealistic project.

What we did was that we in a year put together a Maemo compatible platform. Fully open source. Impressive, from a technical point of view. Good for users? Not always.

The (sad) part of my job is that what I do isn't always directly visible as having originated with me. If anything, we've had a central point for developing and hacking these devices on a system level - not just on applications. Again, I think a lot of people will go on record to say I've helped them along or found places for their work to be in.

Mer^2 was being worked on for the sole reason of a short-term solution for the N8x0 users to be able to run Fremantle applications. Maemo GTK+ does not currently exist in MeeGo, making this goal difficult. I have doubts if it makes sense to work on this, too.

If we're going to analyze this from a simple resource point of view, then let us go for MeeGo. It won't solve the problem of N8x0 being left behind short term, but long term it would, instead of maintaining a distro or a backport, we maintain a hardware adaptation. Which is a hell lot easier. MeeGo's as portable as Mer was.

We already have skilled people successfully getting a modern kernel on it. MeeGo, is - probably much to everyone's joy, not managed by me and is a platform a lot of different device vendors, communities, etc will use. This work on the platform would be directly transferable to our N8x0 devices.

I would actually like to ask you to start a thread on "Stskeeps's distmaster work - how has he been performing and what would we like to see him do in the future". Let's hear what community says I should be doing and what I've done wrong - let us clear the slate about my performance and mistakes once and for all.

What I do is fight for things benefiting the community and the users in MeeGo, such as openness, open devices, etc and a lot of random facilitation to activate people and make them feel they're contributing to something, not just a black hole (read: a bug report that noone ever merges the fix from). And doing it with skill and proving my point by technical means?

Now, is that not something worth having me doing?