I use the n800 since > 2 years now and recently obtained a n900. I'm not a full time software developer but use linux since at least 1996.
From my point of view the maemo community and the interaction with nokia is not as bad as described int he article, at least documentation and information about architecture and code are available, as mentioned before finding them is the hard part.
Like e.g. the introduction to opengles porting, I would have expected to find something here: http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/...eveloper_Guide
However, I found it later by accident under http://wiki.maemo.org/OpenGL-ES by using google (the maemo.org search seems to be completely broken atm). That is inconvenient, however I have not yet met many wikis that are organised any better.
The downtime of maemo.org is also not worse than what i've seen from other community pages, in the last 2 years I can only remember two times where I was unable to connect it, that the server move on the weekend caused an outtime can hardly be described as "more down than available". However the speed of maemo.org was often unacceptable, I hope that got solved by the move now.
Decision making unclear and in closed doors might have a point, however I personally was not disturbed by that. But I also know that i was sent mails that invited me to participate in votes for decisions on such topics...
Licensing and legalese - i have not encountered these for NXX0 devices up to now. I can build my applications in the SDK and install them without having to sign anything or to hack my device, I can simply do that. I'm not sure if I miss understand something here but I did not yet encounter anything like that in my two years of NXX0 usage.
A valid point is the 'silence' thing. nokia could be more vocal, but to be honest - imho thats true for most companies I know

All in all I can't see how the maemo community is treated any worse by nokia than most other communities associated with a company that is not a complete open source company.