With the arrival of a n900 installable MeeGo or with the replacement of the n900 by a new MeeGo phone, the maemo history will probably end if things continue the way they are today. Imho MeeGo will not have the hildon libraries (but it will in fact come with gtk), so most of todays maemo software will not compile nor run on MeeGo.

In this context i'd like to see one of the following things:

* Maemo5 final running on 3rd party hardware (Beagleboard, Touch Book) as a basis of community based Maemo devices, or
* a usable version of Mer able to run todays Maemo apps
* In this context: Nokia releasing either the source code of the closed source core components or at least Nokia giving the permission to redistribute the closed source components as part of a 3rd party Maemo5 or Mer image/device/whatever

I really think either the next half year will show a possibility to build community developed Maemo units or this entire discussion is rather futile.

Or somone will port all the hildon libs to MeeGo and current Maemo apps will be able to run on MeeGo, then Maemo might indeed just fade away with nobody really missing it ...