Because MeeGo is just a name and it uses exactly the same software components than your precious Maemo5? GStreamer, Pulseaudio, Linux, X, Qt aren't going anywhere. Either they backport the bug fixes or not. But IMHO, it has ~nothing to do with MeeGo.

For someone who is just getting into developing in Qt, this is great news!

But I think think this could be potentially very bad news for Microsoft and Google (Android and Chrome OS). For Apple it won't probably make any difference at all, as long they continue to have that hugely successful marketing department.

I don't like the happy-colorful-mainstream-people image of the MeeGo page. It feels like the os will be idiot-proof and not "hackable" anymore.
It's still Linux, so I got some hope left ;-)

I really liked the concept of moblin/maemo so I hope they don't try to adapt it to much to iPhone-OS / Android or similar mainstream products.

User perspective: When I bought my n900 I knew it was going to be superseded by a new phone in less than a year. All phones will. Period.

Nokia was quite clear about the n900 being "step 4 of 5". If you did not know this, you did not research your purchase. Not Nokias fault at all!

Developer perspective: More support behind the platform, more openness. How can that be bad, even if you'' have to repackage? Heck, there might even be someone out there who will help you do it.

The biggest question for the Maemo has always been if it could get a user base big enough to be worthwhile for developers to make applications and users to invest money in buying. We have had high hopes but no guarantees. In every possible way that hope has been increased with this decision.

Android is expected to sell tens of millions of devices this year and even more later on. Nothing will "kill" the iPhone - to suggest it is plain stupid. The only question is, what OS's can exist and thrive besides these two?

Here is a list of solutions that people are questioning:

• Windows Mobile? Imploding fast, but MS still is a big force.
• Palm OS? Hardly a blip on the radar.
• Bada? Brings nothing new or interesting to the table.
• Symbian? It has a strong market share and probably will not die in any foreseable future, but is not for bad *** phones
• LiMo? Who needs it if MeeGo is 100 % open?

Until today Maemo was on this list of endangered species as well. Being best is not how you survive! OS/2 was better than Windows and still lost. The x86 architecture was probably the worst 16-bit architecture around in 1980, but it still won. More examples at http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theat...?v=crockonjs-1

Bottom line: I am really happy I bought an n900 and today's announcement have not decreased my happiness. I am expecting more effort to go into my platform because of this, not less.

Not really. It works pretty much in the same way as .deb, with YUM repositories doing the same job as APT repositories.

The main difference is that it's slightly easier to build a .rpm package from scratch than it is a .deb, but this usually becomes a liability as things like dependency checking are less covered. .RPM-based distributions often do things more or less like RedHat and Oracle do in terms of initialization scripts, services etc, whereas .DEB-based distributions do things like Debian and Ubuntu (and Maemo) do.

This said, the problem is not the format, but rather the effort required to switch from one to another. Things like the autobuilder etc will have to be rewritten.

thanks, now i have the vision of a tv with tegra2 and bluetooth running some game or other with a wiimote or ps3 controller paired...

I like the move and teh potential it has, having an OS that spreads different architectures and is driven by intel and nokia sounds very nice to me indeed.

I don't like the timing of this actually. It leaves me with the impression, that nokia either was unhappy with the community and customer response to maemo 5 and hop into the MeeGo adventure right away, or that they prematurely released the n900 knowing they'd switch in the near future leaving a questionmark as to why the device was released at that somewhat early stage anyways.

If they announced this last october and released the n900 with MeeGo Beta instead of Maemo 5 everything would be fine imho. But with the n900 demonstrating nokias commitment to maemo the sudden embrace of Moblin leaves a bitter taste and a lot of open questions at least to me.

On paper:

(GNU*Linux+ARM+Nokia+Intel) - (Microsoft+Apple+Google) =

WIN

meego.com defo needs a forum and fast. Couldn't find a forum on the moblin site either :P

so at least maemo could bring meego a forum if nothing else (just kidding)

I’m really glad with this news. In my opinion all linux should join. Google should join. Their refusal make me think they a evil agenda.