I think that a point made back in January, and apparently followed to a T by Nokia (and neglected here to some degree,) deserves to be reposted here.

LCA: How to destroy your community

Indeed, a LOT of them continued to be followed by Intel and Nokia now, with the start of MeeGo. I suppose a lot of people wandering in from the iPhone and Android world are used to such treatment, which is why all the irritation seems to come out here. Let me cite a few that I think exemplify the issues here:

#1 is to make the project depend as much as possible on difficult tools.
This, however, can be forgiven as the N900 has always been a geek target and the evolving tools for MeeGo seem to resolve some of the issues. But better tools are NEVER a problem and hard to use tools ALWAYS keep people away.

4: Project decisions should be made in closed-door meetings.
Which easily describes the entirety of the MeeGo design process to this point, as well as some Maemo processes that led to fiascos like PR1.2 taking forever. All of the design decisions regarding interfaces, UX/UI design, toolkits, etc. have been done behind the community's back. My comment above regarding iPhone and Android developers stands with respect to this, and is a key point of why Android Is Not Open (cf. GeneralAntilles.)

7: Governance obfuscation.
I think this has largely resulted due to the MeeGo migration. What, exactly, is the status of Maemo governance with the move to the aforementioned closed-door meetings surrounding the MeeGo migration?

9: Do not allow anybody outside the company to have commit access, ever.
I'm supposing this is the case, haven't heard of anyone in the community fixing and committing patches. This is absolutely the case for the numerous closed components. The release cycle as it stands certainly wouldn't encourage people to seek commit rights as it is.

quoting the last one in full:

10: Silence. Don't answer queries, don't say anything. A company which masters this technique may not need any of the others; it is the most effective community destroyer of them all.

Obviously Nokia has not yet mastered this one, as Quim is still here in the conversation and a couple others still float around, powerless though they appear to be.

And as for maemo.org, #2 applies to some degree.

So really, everything Nokia is doing (and the MeeGo project is adopting) is basically the worst possible moves to make with regards to a community. Taking that list SERIOUSLY for the warning that it is, would likely do wonders towards people's opinion of Nokia.