Why should they? Look at the community...
You have only summarized whats going one here the last months. You have collect it for them. Now they can easily look at it, go thru the list and hopfully learn...

Nokia needs to fire the top brass simple, that is the only solution. All this R&D money spent positioning themselves for future market play was a waste, Nokia's leadership has only positioned themselves for failure.

Folks time for trying to reason with Nokia are over, they are incabable of listening. Their position in the world has taught them only way, to plow forward and never apologize. They aren't going to acknowedge our issues, nor do they care if Maemo is obsolete leaving N900 to be the quickest to EOL product. So what we want or may want won't be coming forthrigt. As consumers we can only speak with our wallets, and voice our opinions to potential buyers of the Nokia brand. Sites like Engadget, I won't correct them on false or ill-informed posts I won't endorse the company that treats me and others like dirt. Again not anything to do with the N900, it is a product amongst many. Why I'm passionate about this is that this is a culture, and not even a culture that enhances their profitability as they keep losing money:

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/...q2-and-fy2010/

So I oppose this featurephone business model being used on the smartphone game. Nokia you are losing credibility, the boss must quit and the top brass must be fired, this culture needs to be washed out. Also the N-Series should not cater to Symbian, Symbian belongs on the E-series, X-series, C-series, and S40 on featurephones ... the N8 is a waste of time and dilutes the strategy.

IMHO the problem is not Banshee/Evolution per se, but that those two releases had no right to be called MeeGo 1.0, because they are not that. I'm not sure marketing people understand the damage they are doing and what the collateral component grandfathering can cause on the long run (especially considering the sentiment on the meego-dev list... scary).

OK, I think I followed your metaphor, up to this point. What in the world does this "official sign" represent? I see a bunch of old Maemo hands (especially the Mer guys) over there, who are apparently represented by your friends who are now helping Jim. But you're saying you specifically are disallowed from Jim's treehouse, does this mean you specifically, or a certain Average-Joeish subset of the Maemo community in general, are in some way disallowed from MeeGo? Did I miss some snub of the Maemo community by MeeGo? AFAIK the only reason Average Joes aren't mucking about with MeeGo is because it's only half-done, not because they've been deemed unwelcome.

The nearest I can come up with (and I feel like I'm really reaching here, so I'm quite possibly wrong) is that this is a reflection of the notion that, because there's no official MeeGo-on-N900 release, there won't be an end-user ready one at all. If so, I think you badly misread Jim's official sign.

I do understand where that idea comes from -- after all, Nokia said more or less the same things about non-official, but more-or-less Nokia-funded community backport of Maemo 5 to the N8x0, named Mer. It was supposed to be the equivalent of the old OS200xHE backports to the 770, only now community-driven so we wouldn't have to wait on Nokia for update and bugfixes. And it died without progressing from hacker's toy to end-user OS update.

Now, we're told that there'll be no official Maemo6/Harmattan/MeeGo/whatever release for the N900, but it's being adapted to the N900 because (for now) the N900 is the standard ARM dev platform, and Nokia's dropping hints, though not promising, that you should be running a bright shiny community build on your N900 in six months to a year. And there's reason, I grant, to suppose that, as this is equally non-official, it'll be equally dead when the next device arrives.

But there's at least one major difference that I've not seen mentioned at all:

• The N8x0->N900 transition was a huge hardware jump, from an OMAP2 platform to OMAP3. Since many system components (including a bunch of closed ones that might have been made redistributable) depended, directly or not, on that hardware shift, you couldn't just run the new userland on the old hardware with just the kernel and some low-level drivers swapped out. To get a good port, access to the source of many of these would be required, or writing a replacement from scratch.
  
• The N9 (or whatever the first Meego device is -- I'll call it N9 here), by all (unconfirmed) leaked reports, is an OMAP3, and specifically an OMAP3640 -- essentially identical to the N900's OMAP3430, but with a process shrink and higher clocks. While this similarity doesn't necessarily make it legal to procure a copy of Nokia's Harmattan release for the N9, mash it up with the latest hackers-only N900 build, and come up with what amounts to a Harmattan-N900 build, I think it will make it technically straightforward, and going from there to legal will only require Nokia to make some closed components redistributable to owners of previous Nokia devices, not open-source or even globally re-distributable -- much easier to push through.

There's also the whole point that MeeGo's aiming to be more open and more upstream-aligned than Maemo 5, which should also ease things (i.e. much less, if any, platform-level stuff will be obstacles), but that's been hashed around already.

My attitude at the moment is to just mostly ignore MeeGo until there's actually something compelling for me to care about. I don't care about Harmattan because it is completely intangible. I think I'm not alone.

When a real MeeGo with a full set of functioning drivers and the reference handset UI hits the Internet, I will become much more interested.

I know I can't be alone. I bet there's a huge number of capable developers and community members who are sitting on the MeeGo sidelines waiting to see what will happen.

Until then, I will just keep working on my Maemo stuff*, and learning Qt programming and RPM packaging on the side. Honestly, how can we be expected to do anything else?

* I need beta testers for the extended mimetype handler package (currently called dbus-switchboard)...

Well, I have my hopes up on MeeGo, not being enthusiastic though, but I do have my hopes up.. here's why.. Symbian have always got all the support from Nokia because it was the high-end OS basically.. But now since MeeGo is now the high-end OS, I believe they will support it pretty well... This is just my 0.02 cents tho.. We will have to wait and see..

Not over yet. If it were, we wouldn't have this conversation. There's still time to bank left. Will they? Unlikely. We'll be here, waving arms an pointing at the iceberg.

That may as well go down as one the worst moves in Nokia's modern history.

You see, most people that jumped to tablets were already Nokia clients. When moved to tablet, they were MOVED from the overall buyer base.

Losing them won't make them jump back to N8, but to a competition tablet. I will. I'm not buying a dumbphone, I don't care if it films in 4K.

Plowing tablet division in the ground will not be free.

I don't think they will intentionally do that. Nobody's that disconnected. It is entirely possible for the buyer base to become slimmed through this "upgrade" they do.

Will they come back? Who knows?

Will it have an impact knowing that tablets and internet phones are now jumping sales like mexican beans? Oh yeah.

When business waves happen, you either go with it, or you don't; It's a LOT easier to keep a market share if you're fighting for a percentage of a growing market. If you stagnate, the others will grow past and your share will decrease as a percentage.

My wallet and I I no longer on speaking terms following THIS purchase. (I kid, I kid)

I never could understand this either. Nokia used to be German in order and thinking. 1 for low end and car kits, 2 for low, 3 for better, 5 for medium, 6 for slim, reliable business, 7 for the tech, 8 for style over features, 9 for feature over form. You used to look at a design and guess "61...what?"

Then we had the more ambiguous N and E. N was tech-oriented, E was business oriented, which is bad enough, because E has -e.g.- office, software. So basically the old N who had better hardware lacked in applications.

Then N80 (and higher end N) had office. Which is the point I stopped caring. I think they're down to coin toss now. "And then there was X".

Sorry, that "official sign" was supposed to be a link. The link was to a post that was the original announcement (or wave thereof) in which it was announced that MeeGo will not be supported over N900.

Ok, I'll be more correct and say "You can come, but no juice and we won't talk to you".

Yes. No official support means no bugs, no direct fixes. Look at the rate of support for officially supported releases.

You can run, but with no rights. Come, but no juice and we will pretend you are not really here.

I can adjust this indefinitely, but it's a metaphor and as a result, not identical to the situation. The fact remains that "dropping hints" of an unsupported install is DEFINITELY worse than what we had with M5.

And M5 was SO finely supported. Hey, maybe we can just get the platform and rebuild phone and patc... wait, those are still closed.

Either it's official and updates ripple through to us and we move forward software-wise, or they just build one to shut us up, at which point no updates (or some) for M5 and no updates for M6.

I wouldn't mind no updates. My DSLR has no updates, even though it's flashable. But you know what, I've hit the shutter over ten thousand times. NOT ONCE has it misfired, delayed, mistook, failed to write, thought about it. never have I set the aperture to 4.5 and have it be 3.5. never has it taken an image at ISO 3200 by mistake.

I could go on, but I'll summarize. Zaroo bugs, knowing it is a complex piece of machinery that constantly adjusts for wear, dust, a lens that was made by third party.

You won't see me at Sony forums crying for an update. There's a 1.01 or something that updates file format to ARW 2.0 and increases speed of who-cares-what. I couldn't be bothered, BECAUSE IT'S NOT BROKEN.

Fremantle is.

I'm sorry, I don't follow. I have no experience with Linux. Back over here, we have this thing called a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer), where the OS works with the HAL and it mounts drivers underneath it, making hardware transparent for the OS.

Using this, one can run the OS over the same architecture simply by swapping drivers and adding a few mods to the UI to incorporate the differences in drivers. It's what allows me to swap my video card without installing a new OS.

I wish Linux had that.

(I am just being difficult, there is no need to enlighten me)

As for the back-release of drivers and open source, what can I say, I wish I was optimistic as you. Could happen.

Just so you know, you're not alone--I feel the same way. Personally I think all this talk about MeeGo, and that it's not (officially) coming to the N900 is a little premature. I think the real question should be if we even want MeeGo or not. Right now, I'm not so sure I do, as it's a completely unknown quantity.

The allure of Maemo, and potentially MeeGo, for me was that I could use Linux/Gtk/Gnome programming know-how that I already had and apply it to a mobile device. That's something that is really unique to Maemo/MeeGo, and it's more or less the only reason I bother messing around with Nokia despite their flagrantly poor handling of the whole thing.

Now, I'd love it if I could get those same things with MeeGo, hopefully with some more mainstream appeal thrown in. Now that would be something I'd be interested in. But the real question is: Can Nokia actually make that happen? Sometimes I just don't know for sure...

Sorry for the second post, but I feel I need to clarify a bit: I am afraid to contribute to MeeGo at the stage it is at now, because it is still all policy and planning. There's nothing really yet to file bugreports on, nobody in the giant corporations making the policy and doing the planning really cares about my opinions, and the actual coding that's going on isn't really open yet...

I have a good recent example. A few weeks ago, I got an e-mail from a Nokia employee who asked me some questions about my Easy Chroot scripts because they might incorporate some of the code into the MeeGo chroot installation.

He asked me some questions, and I helped him as much as I could, and then I suggested that we continue discussing this on a mailing list or forum or somewhere else public. His answer was very non-committal and I've heard nothing since.

Honestly, how do community members contribute to a project such as this, with paid developers working madly behind the scenes, with very little incentive to discuss things publicly, and the whole system still in flux?

The take I get is that as long as Maemo 5 is supported (mostly for bug fixing and updates for things like Flash) for a decent amount of time, many people share those sentiments.

Now I feel "decent amount of time" is 2 years after launch-- but then, launch has been scattered across regions and dates so that can get sticky. How about 2 years after last launch?

But I'm doubtful that it will. And if it doesn't, that tells me Nokia doesn't quite get the mobile computer business... which will bode badly for MeeGo devices.

We'll see.