I saw that on a tweet, this is why I even asked this question.

Because what I understand from Maemo 6 will be a MeeGo instance is that Maemo 6 will still exist as a branch of MeeGo or as a customized MeeGo.

Nokia has thousands of lines of code that are not opened in Maemo, will be these opened and give to MeeGo or they will be kept as a branch of MeeGo.

In other words: Is Nokia keeping some of the investment of its development to keep an advantage over other Linux OSes which are closed, not open source (SAMSUNG's Bada, Palm's WebOS, Apple's iPhone OSX) or other Linux OSes partially opened (Google's Android, LiMo) or other closed OSes (RIM),
or is it giving to Intel and others even the code that was closed in Maemo?

I don't see it as a failure so much as I see it as a way to make Nokia's investment in Maemo relevant. Intel seems to have invested more in Moblin and several different OEMs are using it. This allows Nokia to leverage Maemo into an OS which can run on high end phones and focus their own efforts on the hardware. Not to mention expanding the market for third party developers.

Maemo was already, as far as I know, for high end smart-phones. And why should Nokia focus on hardware, and not on software? Is Intel going to take over the OS development from now on?

This is a simple request to rename this forum but it's worth getting into more details to clarify things.

Harmattan is the name of the software program that comes after Fremantle / Maemo 5. In the Maemo Summit we already announced it as "Maemo 6" in order to bring a clear signal about the major update, change of toolkit, etc.

Now MeeGo comes to the picture. "Maemo 6" will not be used by Nokia as a brand since all the marketing effort around the software platform will be around MeeGo.

To be clear: this is not about "ditching" or "abandoning" any platform. The Harmattan program keeps working with the same plans than last week, no matter the name of the product they will deliver. Maemo 6 and Moblin 2.x merge and have a successor called MeeGo. Current Maemo people will look at it and will say "looks like his mother!". Current Mblin people will look at it and will say "looks like his father!" (or choose your preferred gender) Of course you will see changes compared to Maemo 5, but these changes were coming anyway with Maemo 6.

What does this mean exactly for Harmattan7MeeGo? It means different things for different people:

- For end users nothing really changes, apart from a name most of them were not aware of anyway.

- For application developers not much changes. Harmattan's developer offering is based on Qt 4.6 + Qt Creator, Web Runtime + Aptana. Same for MeeGo and btw same for Symbian. Harmattan *might* have extended APIs unique to Nokia devices (e.g. Ovi APIs), but we'll see and this is part of the MeeGo flexibility anyway. Wait for the SDKs to be released and then we can discuss in more detail. There will be also the APIs available for those willing to use them, provided directly by other open source components in the platform (e.g. GStreamer). Developers will be of course free to use them, at the expense of loosing compatibility with Symbian, and with MeeGo... depends on the component and to be seen as soon as there is a detailed MeeGo architecture public. Then there will be the obvious difference in packaging (deb still for Harmattan, rpm for MeeGo) but this won't be the big issue and anyway compatibility with Symbian implies specific packaging as well.

- For those caring about the platform in depth, Harmattan =! MeeGo. If we would make Harmattan identical to MeeGo then we would need to postpone dates and, really not for a good reason. Not a reason for app developers (the API is there anyway) and not a good reason for end users, who could not care less about packaging and some obscure middleware components. This is the only reason making Ari Jaaksi refer to Harmattan as a "MeeGo instance" instead of just "MeeGo product".

This is why we are dropping the "Maemo 6" *brand* while keeping all the Harmattan development full speed and in the same direction that it was.

Now I can add more buzz words like MeeGo to my CV. Nice

Thanks @qgil for taking time to clear certain things.

I believe this has been asked before and will be asked again.
Will there be an OFFICIAL MeeGo release for the N900 from Nokia?

useful reading to get the context: Nokia Software Strategy updated: http://www.nokia.com/NOKIA_COM_1/Tec...hite_paper.pdf

available at http://www.nokia.com/technology

Quim you forgot to address all the incumbent changes to the community. What happens to those who run Maemo branded forums? To those who are currently members of the Maemo council? What happens to those who work on the Maemo infrastructure and code base - there already exists a MeeGo code base and infrastructure.

Unfortunately, there will be many changes to the community, not all of them positive.

At least the branding question is clarified now

Following up Jeremiah's question: is Nokia committed to bring/support the community (with Talk and end-users included) for meego too?

So... is it going to be Debian or Fedora based?