That will make me REALLY ANGRY. All those bugs marked closed / Fixed in fremantle but won't be available to current owners.

you have every right to be angry about this. i am, too. especially since nokia already treated me this way when i had my 770. they suddenly dropped support (with no good reason, although they tried to make up some excuses) and announced new OS-updates would be for the N800 only. there was an uproar, nokia said they'd learned from it and promised not to do this again. now here we are.

on the one hand, it shows nokia still thinks of the tablets as "embedded devices", similar to phones where the firmware is tightly connected to the hardware. they still, after all these years, haven't understood their own products.

on the other hand, this time it's a little different:
the number of alternative operating systems for the tablets grows. many are not end user ready, but make good progress. most importantly, there's mer, a project supported by nokia. mer will be as close to fremantle as you can get, but very independent from nokia's management decisions.

so while i'm angry, too ("fool me once,... fool me twice,..."), i make up excuses for nokia (they sure had to cut costs, too. maemo seems to be doing well inside nokia ATM, but probably the responsible managers face cuts in their budgets as everybody else nowadays). and i take comfort from following mer's steady progress. these guys are doing a great job, and probably they'll deliver what nokia can't.

Not only they did it again, they did it even worse this time :-) There was Elephanta OS version planned/promised for N8x0 which was later canceled. They never promised OS2007 for 770. They did promise longer roadmap for N8x0 than delivered. Also there are now unconfirmed hints that there won't be any more Diablo update so we are left with half broken version with many bugs not present in Chinook. One needs to choose from two OS2008 versions both with different set of bugs in two main applications (browser, email client).

Still, they did many things really well and are opening more and more stuff which indeed helps. Supporting Mer effort is far more effective than doing any hacker editions of OS inside Nokia.

mer is a great project. We should have cautious optimism here about the level of support from nokia. AFAICT, we are still waiting for them to release some components and some vital 3rd party elements, such as flash, for use in mer.

i should have said "encouraged" rather than "supported", maybe. - well, i'm still optimistic, you see. don't know why.

This has absolutely nothing to do with Nokia and everything to do with Adobe. If you want to see it, bug Adobe.

No, "supported" is the right term (actually, "is supporting" would be even better).

Here is a direct quote from qgil:

"We asked the Mer team to list the *3rd party* closed source packages they need, since they don't belong to Nokia and therefore we need to make sure the owners are fine with the deal.

For instance, Flash belongs to Adobe and Skype belongs to Skype Inc. The agreements signed with these companies are framed for official releases going through a quite demanding quality process. If Nokia would let the Mer team (or whoever) grab those binaries for other purposes then those agreements would be in trouble, affecting e.g. the negotiations for Fremantle."

Yeah I made an @ss of myself and got the Mer team angry at me, because I was all confused about what components were being discussed, and what Nokia was offering, and what the Mer team was asking, and, well, everything; I mouthed off about stuff I didn't understand. One good thing that (perhaps) came of my thick-headedness was qgil's excellent explanation, quoted by SD69 above.

Your accusation seemed to be that Nokia wasn't really helping much, giving 3rd-party stuff as an example. In the end, the decision to allow distribution of the licensed 3rd-party components doesn't belong to Nokia, it belongs to the owners of those 3rd-party components. Nokia's doing what it can to make it happen, but any lack of progress isn't to be blamed on Nokia (as you did).

And likely, end-user pressure on the third parties will be more effective than pressure on Nokia for non-Nokia components. In other words, Nokia telling the third parties, "Hey, our users want this," will have more meaning if the third parties also hear from actual users who, yes, "want this".