As far as I know, Orange is just a France Telecom's brand. and France Telecom was privatized in January 1998. In 2010 The french governement hold a stake of 27% so it's not really owned by french governement.

On the other hand EDF is a private corporation owned at 85% by french governement.

For the orange customization problem I agree with you, it's a crime and should be punished by law

what i want to know is whether Orange will be supporting any development that benefits MeeGo as a whole, not just things directed only at Orange customers

O2 is owned by Telefonica (national telco of Spain)

Interestingly when i spoke to orange retentions before departing for tmobile (yes i know they are merging) I was told that the reason they weren't getting the n900 officially on orange was due to it being open source and therefore very hard to support as users would be able to ''mess'' with their own phones.. Obviously the descion to support meego will have been taken at a much higher level than the person i spoke with and it clearly shows an interesting juxtaposition with current orange policy. Lets hope their support does contribute to platform development and not close it down. Would be interesting to see whether orange utimatley plan to offer future android devices too and continue to offer the iphone... if they become a provider who only offer meego smartphone devices then that would be interesting but somehow i doubt that will be the case..

@jacktanner : don't know for this case but france telecom already know open source/free software as he is a founding member of ow2 consortium which work in the open source field.

So there's hope.

I guess the difference with MeeGo is that the DRM might allow them to make their own kernel with their branding, that the user cannot remove.

This is the lines that I was thinking along. I wonder how long after such a decision they then move to only allowing phones on their network that have their kernel embedded in them too?

True, we shouldn't always jump to the worst conclusions, and dwelling only on the negative never got anyone anywhere. Let's see what happens. I know I need to look at the bright side a bit more often.

That would certainly be a retrograde step.. I wonder if it would make any sense from a business pov though? After all, the less handsets the provider has to subsidise and the more people just paying to access the network the more profit surely? Delivering a reduced feature set to none branded handsets might be the way it goes though..

So... do you want mobile Linux going mainstream or not? Do you want a serious alternative in the market based on free software and standard Linux and free desktop technologies or not? Are you going to panic every time a mainstream player joins or not?

Advice to worried people: please worry about concrete things.

I don't know more than you about this Orange case as I just read the same public info than you. Expect to see more announcements like this, some from partners you like, some of partners you dislike. Any new announcement adds more developers and users to MeeGo so, really, you should be happy about each one of them.

So it looks like Orange will take MeeGo vanilla and will adapt it to their needs. Great! This is what MeeGo is meant for, btw. If this means that they will put developers to tweak their own UX variant and create their own (Qt / Web Runtime based?) apps, great! All this will bring useful feedback about the UX layers and the API, for sure. Whatever else they do to adapt MeeGo will be also useful feedback for the platform development.

Then I guess MeeGo apps will be installable on these MeeGo based Orange devices? How can this be bad news for the developers and the users of those apps in other devices?

If you don't like what Orange does with MeeGo then don't get a MeeGo device from Orange. I really don't understand the point of whining.

"Too much influence over the platform", what would this mean in practice? Please figure this out before worrying, otherwise you don't really know what you are worrying about. Bringing plenty of bugfixes in the form of patches? Contributing new features? Proposing better alternatives for software components that they would maintain?

This is an Orange/Intel announcement about MeeGo. If you still need extra words of comfort you can ask the sources. I think I'm over my duties answering as a Nokia guy in a maemo.org forum.