Somehow I'm quite glad to hear this.

Maemo's worst downside was always the fact that the end user (community) had to depend to Nokia - a hardware vendor - on the continued support and maintenance of the platform. Obviously it was always in Nokia's interest to obsolete (intentionally or through neglect) platform versions running on devices that had already been sold!

Joining forces with Intel (which has reputation for rather solid OSS support) should somewhat extende the scope of that legacy support, but Intel still prefers to shovel out new hardware to replace the already sold...

Novell's SUSE on the other hand represents pure software development, maintenance and support, besides bringing in some valuable resources and skills to the soft side of user experience.

I'm kind of curious to see how these parties coordinate their development efforts, but after abandoning the Debian "universe", I'd consider Novell's presence (with their repos and timely porting tradition) as the next best thing for Mae... MeeGo.