I see I have not been that far off the mark in my blog post abot Harmattan being no man’s land between Maemo and MeeGo three months ago And yes, the naming issue is becoming painfully apparent, too. There will be strategic choices to be made, some are happening right now, and some have already been made.

I was puzzled to see, for example community managers with attitude of "I think it's important to separate end users of the open source project from the end users of vendors who purchase a device from that vendor". How are you going to build a community when you’re distancing yourself from people who are the only ones to give you feedback and crucial for an OSS community needs to thrive ? In essence, there is (and will) be no single MeeGo community to transition to, there is meego.com, for which you need a developer badge to enter, and the rest of you will be shooed away into specific manufacturer forums (say goodbye to user-developer synergy or not reinventing the wheel on issues common to all MeeGo devices). Not a thrilling prospect from an OSS perspective.

As for the naming. Please, when changing the provisional name - please do not use the sintagm "based on MeeGo". If marketing twists your arm and you absolutely have to include MeeGo in the name, do it in a way that will make the relation to it clear (i.e. based on MeeGo is fairly misleading as Harmattan is not based on MeeGo, it’s more of Qt/OBS lowest common denominator relation).

Last, but not least, make a Harmattan -> MeeGo transition strategy. Wrap it in candy paper if you have to (guaranteed upgrade to MeeGo 1.2 !) but if you want to leverage the MeeGo brand by hiding Maemo roots, the hard work of getting MeeGo onto the N9 (hardware adaptation project and all) will also be have hidden in order not to create a Harmattan-is-a-MeeGo-bait-and-switch impression. The GOOD aspect is that at least people from the community can see this, and suggest changes before things get to an ad acta state - we might seem a nuisance and sound acid at times, but that is because we want it to succeed.