That seems to be the attitude of plenty of people, but I see it differently...

Yeah, sure, Nokia (for whatever reason) didn't polish some areas as much as we'd hoped, and they left out some things. I wouldn't jump to declaring that they were offloading "their work" onto others - that's a big presumption. Keep in mind, they did do a heck of a lot of work between Maemo 4 and Maemo 5, and the N900 still had a lot of enviable features at launch that were missing from other platforms, for that matter. In any case, you're portraying it as the community being a bunch of chumps, and Nokia being lazy and dishonest -- and that's just plain wrong.
Many of the community developers got the phone because it was what suited them, and because it was the only "real" Linux phone on the market with anyone big behind it (yes, I know Android is based on Linux, but it's not really the same). Personally, a good portion of people's major complaints didn't bother or didn't affect me, and the ones that did were outweighed (for me) by its strengths. I think this is a pretty common attitude for people in my demographic. The community wasn't "tricked" into doing free labour for Nokia; rather, they took something that was awesome in many ways, and did their best to fix the things that weren't awesome. A huge amount of people all over the world work on Free/Open Source projects, most of them for no direct financial benefit. In this case, it wasn't a matter of having to "fix their broken phone", but rather a matter of "being able to improve" a product that they liked. That's really the key - whatever Nokia's motives, setbacks, etc., what they gave to us was empowerment. Thanks to Nokia, we can fix things we don't like, and we can add things they left out. There are very few other phones that you can say that about at the same level as the N900.
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