Though this is mostly meaningless for owners of current/past Maemo devices and will remain so until we can actually buy a MeeGo device.

This isn't a terribly clear message in the context of this discussion. I get that Maemo is now "legacy" and if Nokia isn't willing to open anything up that's fine. If they are willing that's even better of course, but tell us if it's worth our time to continue pursuing licence change requests or not. I mean, even when the licence change request queue was active there was only one component opened out of it.

A completely open OS is a worthwhile goal in general, but I think we all realise by now that Nokia isn't Qi, Lemote or Openmoko. In practical terms there are two main reasons why people want some components opened:

1. Running non-Maemo distributions on Nokia hardware: this is usually about low-level core components like bme and libcal without which "porting" say Debian to an N810 is pointless.
2. Fixing bugs: this usually concerns high-level UI components like apps, control panel applets and the like. I suspect most people wouldn't care about the licence if Nokia fixed the bugs (some of which are extremely triviai) themselves.

(there is some overlap of course,, closed-source core components can be buggy too).

If you take a slightly more high-level view, these can be summarised in one reason: people don't like it when the hardware they bought becomes obsolete due to stale software. The best way to counter that is to make sure that the Harmattan device(s) will also be able to run "real" MeeGo 1.2 once it's out, as well as at least all future 1.x versions.