Big difference with Nokia: You can use Mer and Nemo now, on various other devices. In fact you can use them on *any* device as long as it has linux drivers (too bad this is only true for x86 and pretty much nothing else) Maemo was never able to run on anything else than NIT's, not because of lack of drivers, but because of dependency spaghetti (deliberate or not) They have cleanly seperated their code from the community code, no tangled binary dependencies, no stupid maemo-generic-pr metapackage. They also contribute to open projects as they work, no big code-drops, android/Tizen style. If that is not openness what is it? Ok some GUI apps may be closed, so what? We can make replacements, it's not like we'll need to reverse-engineer bme. The system is so compliant to standards that people have managed to run the actual sailfish os from the x86 emulator image on compatible tablets. Try that with maemo. PS. N959 is a Nokia/Boeing/Porsche hybrid?