Well, judging by his general attitude in the article, I'm starting to wonder a bit if the negative part of the talks was from his side. He also confuses WeTab for being MeeGo, which it hardly is. Entire UX is self-made.

I think the conference was great. It was a good mix of open source community feeling with industry representatives trying to do things in the MeeGo way of working (Transparency, Inclusion, Meritocracy, Upstream first philosophy).

An example of this was the ARM BoF (which I ran). At the same table different ARM vendors sat and discussed together, openly, about MeeGo in ARM and regarding their devices. Also sat there, hobbyists hacking MeeGo onto those vendor's boards - discussing future directions and industry problems.

At another table people discussed SDK/Developer story problems (OBS), another table some discussed release engineering and kernel developers got together to discuss directions as well.

I feel there was a good open-minded and community spirit in the air. The same is seen in our IRC channels where people even between competitors help with their components / area's of expertise.

That said - you'd have to be a Hurd fanboy to not doubt a little bit about progress and the platform quality and direction. It's a sign of health.

But things are looking damn good in terms of support and industry backing.