Going back to the comment about the Media Player and Calendar. Both could certainly be replaced, but the question is really whether it's worth investing the time and effort to do this as they will presumably be completely replaced in the next Harmattan/Meego release.

Having source available would make this significantly easier and cheaper (in terms of time) to do. OTOH I understand the point about the UI being Nokia's differentiator, though now that Maemo is an old platform, I'd have thought it's less important.

Certainly my view on this conundrum (stuff needs fixing, but who wants to commit to doing that when their work will not last all that long) is to simply wait for a working and fully featured (not in terms of sw, but certainly hw and the sw components that will still be closed) Meego installation for the N900 and just move over completely and then work on Calendars, Media Players, etc., etc. knowing that my work might be useful for more than a month or two.