Here's my opinion about the future of Maemo and maemo.org. I am currently an (un-elected, volunteer) maemo community council member, and an avid member of this community for about 4 years.

Recently, there have been calls for the Maemo community to wrest all the closed bits out of the hands of Nokia, or to somehow turn Maemo into a separate, community-run entity, free of Nokia's sponsorship. I don't see these posts accomplishing anything for two simple reasons; we're never going to get the closed bits from Nokia, and the Maemo community is (almost) nothing without Nokia, mainly because Maemo is nothing without Nokia hardware and that hardware is no longer in production.

I think by the time Nokia funding runs out for maemo.org at the end of 2012 it will be a kingdom of dust; there will be a few nostalgic enthusiasts around, but it will be a lot like any other forum for niche, obsolete platforms; mostly deserted and uninteresting.

I don't see Nokia ever opening any of the closed pieces.

The one tiny hope I see is if a champion within Nokia with some political influence were to fight through the bureaucracy, inertia and indifference to wrestle the closed bits out into the open. But I really just do NOT see that happening, not with most of the closed bits having some link to hardware made by the notorious TI and most of the people who care being laid off from Nokia. Even when Maemo was a vibrant group within Nokia, nobody could get any action on opening closed pieces of old versions of Maemo. Now there is even less hope.

But even if the closed bits were made open, or Cordia succeeded in re-basing the Maemo UI on MeeGo, and Maemo flourished again, the hardware is aging fast. I don't expect to have a working N900 by mid-2012, although my N800 might keep chugging along with a partly-working touchscreen.

Is a community centred around the Cordia tablet really a Maemo community?

Where do I think we should go from here?

I think the best thing the Maemo community can do over the next year and a half is to transition to the MeeGo community, although I don't particularly like the MeeGo.com forums very much, and there haven't been any third-party ITT-style forums popping up elsewhere. I'm hoping for a new N9-centric community to grow up somewhere, hopefully outside of the Linux Foundation's sphere of control. I'll probably go there, wherever that is, until it sputters out in a couple of years.

You may have noticed that I'm not very hopeful. You're right, I'm not. This community has been so amazing, but the foundations are crumbling away beneath us and there's nowhere else to go.

Worst of all, I don't see any alternatives after Harmattan. I don't see anyone else taking up the MeeGo handset torch, and I don't see any other viable Linux handsets on the horizon. The WebOS devices are a possibility, but their current hardware is unappealing (to me), and everyone else is going towards Android, which doesn't have any kind of "normal" GNU/Linux stack, especially an X server. And don't even get me started on the "locked black box" OSes like iOS and WP7.

Are we doomed to lose the GNU\Linux in our Pockets?