Treating your customers like the enemy is why we end up with ******** like DRM being pushed all over the place. End users are the reason devices sell.

Or not, it's perfectly possible to maintain RPM systems with apt too (eg blag linux does this).

That's a bit silly. Why restrict yourself to a single distribution at all? My main desktop systems run Fedora, but when I wanted to install the Maemo SDK I didn't try to shoe-horn it into a system it wasn't designed for, I just created an Ubuntu VM and ran it in that. It got the environment it wanted, and I got it nicely sandboxed into the bargain.

It may have been a political thing - LSB compliance requires RPM support (note: not necessarily exclusively) and for better or worse the Linux Foundation is also involved here.

Y'know, after all these years and versions that one is still my favourite too.

I'm too much of a "if the glass is less than half full then it's certainly not half full" kind of guy to be enthusiastic about this unexpected move :/

I mean, I've been wanting Maemo to succeed because, well... Because it took mobile internet serious at a time when noone else did, and because I think this community right here is quite productive.

I'm sure that they will find a good solution when talk.maemo.org moves on - and I already followed it here from theinternettablettalkforumplaciesite.com - but I'm not sure if it will be a good solution at first. And I think Nokia is taking too long to get to step 5 - mass market, considering the momentum in the Android camp. I mean, the main disadvantage with Android in my book is having to go through Dalvik, but who knows if that will last forever.

I've wanted Maemo to become a success, but I am not at all sure it's going in the right direction. Though, maybe the new project teams will make some good choices.

I don't know what to think, usually I can recognize one outcome more likely than the others, but here I am stumped.

Unfortunately they went and picked a godawful name for their new platform and kill our community out from under us just like that.

I have a lot of emotional attachment to Maemo and maemo.org. Seeing those tossed out the window for Mee "What the hell were they thinking?!" Go just hurts.

Ryan Paul, as always, gets things right in his ars technica article.

Do we actually have to ditch the name? The Fedora community isn't Redhat, the Ubuntu community isn't Debian, does the Maemo community have to be MeeGo?

My largest concerns about this are not around the technology (or if "my N900 will run MeeGo" - for what it's worth, I don't expect it to). The concerns I have are around people.

Like Kathy, I wonder about the place for the user community in this brave new world - the MeeGo site, currently, looks very developer-centric. That may change, but that's where it's at for the moment. I think this forum has demonstrated that users bring value to the whole software/device ecosystem (seemingly the current favo(u)rite word in recent Nokia presentations).

The other area of concern is a new spate of religious wars:

Debian - Good -- Fedora - Bad
deb - Good -- rpm - Bad

and from the other side... (to join in the us/them paradigm myself)

QT - Bad -- GTK/Clutter - Good

These "discussions" waste time and energy and, rarely, provide any value. But they are a fact of life in the software industry.

I just wish they weren't.