AWESOME! Everything will be open..except the drivers for the video and the battery draining management system. That's all. ONLY just two things. The thing that lets you see.. and the one that could shut down the whole system. I think it matters very little to me who owns them, if I intended to buy an open-source device.

And uh..what about the rest of us. You know.. the other half of the forum. You know.. the Internet Tablets?

I think Nokia faces a public image problem. Lost credibility as a market leader to all sorts of Smartphone competition, then they baited and switched on the core base of faithful Nokia users by pulling this Maemo/ MeeGo switcheroo ... effectively obsoleting our N900's the day they announced, 3-4 months after N900 release. I don't know why certain users deny the fact, ignore the fact or plain and simply say ... so what? But this is a Nokia culture that is bad, and doesn't need to be reinforced by silence or pats on the back for a job well done on MeeGo.

To me MeeGo is unecessary. Maemo is Open Source, it was being developed, it was picking up momentum, and all that can be done on MeeGo can be done on Maemo. The only difference is that this is a partnership with Intel, and all the said benefits from OS is a fallacy ... this was and still is purely of business interest as Maemo was just fine own it's own. To add insult to injury, Maemo was long and hard sell to the community ... it was really picking up steam, I now see app's have trickled to a near stop, and updates come rarely now. Nokia has really hurt the goodwill around the N900, and the brand cannot be trusted. I love the N900, I just hate that Nokia made it. I think this is the simplest way of describing the situation, as other manufacturers would have made releases more frequent and would have focused on the product and confidently support the platform, but would they have made a N900 or a Maemo OS?

So MeeGo is not a whole new Linux Ballgame, it is the same game with the same players; now in the same team. Lets not paint a rainbow around it, this is Nokia's worst customer transgression ... condemning a 6-month old phone to obsolescence is such a shame.

Heck even this forum is rendered obsolete, the active user base will begin to dwindle.

I still don't get how this is a "whole new ballgame" - marketing BS because Linux has been open. It's Nokia that's finally getting something right... and still deploying closed sources in a "mostly" open cellphone.

Whole new ballgame. I'm not convinced yet.

Consider if Intel/Nokia somehow, someway gets companies to buy into meego as a platform for development, meego can expect more application support it than maemo can ever hope to achieve. This will happen provided that they do exceptionally bad arse marketing though.

Of course this benefits Nokia, not us -- but we can still hope the community port of Harmattann/n900 to pull through.

I don't think I'm being too idealistic. =(