The question you got to answer is how do they earn money out of something free !.

An open-source OS should be independent of any manufacturer's "ownership" or whims in any case.

Nokia was in the position to essentially kill Maemo because they kept near-total control over it in the first place. For the same reason it never gained greater level of community support. Its openness was of a pseudo kind.

Unfortunately they made the same mistake with MeeGo, with the added complication of having a key partner (Intel) with very different set of priorities (esp. Intel's preference of not having ARM-based MeeGo phones ready when they themselves didn't even have half-competitive mobile chips in the market!)

Having a neutral developer-community driven mobile OS with neutrally operated app repos would be the key. Then any phone or tablet maker could adopt it for their products without worries of underhanded politics.

Since Nokia has chosen to become a mere winpho "box-maker" it would be in the interests of the ARM licensees (or consortium) to pick up the baton and back the development of a complete mobile OS available to anyone wishing to use their increasingly integrated chipsets.

That's what Intel was trying to do with MeeGo, and Intel is looking for development partners so the ARM chipmakers should answer to that call for action!

Long live maemo!!

realistically, why? so as to not reveal nokia engineering practices? or sensitive information that may lead to their other products being cracked? or not to help open source rivals (if there were any)?

what components are still closed source? i know the media player is, hence M.A.G.'s QT rewrite but what else.

To get back on the rails, Nokia would have to completely distance itself from M$ and I don't think Steve (Monkeboy) Ballmer would be an easy thorn to pull.

M$ have allowed Nokia to continue with Symbian for another 12 months, hence their statement that they hope to sell another 15million Symbian units within that time. (Do that many people buy a new phone each day?) Then M$ will dig it's claws in and maybe they'll gradually go for a 100% take over.

CTO Green said though there won't be a Nokia tablet anytime soon. So, I am putting my hopes on one of the phone device protos being released with some variant of Maemo or Meego.

Unfortunately, I am afraid it does not matter much though if or rather likely WHEN Nokia does not put its full weight behind it terms of marketing, push to carriers and FW support.

Quite a bit. I disagree with the figure MohammedAG gives in the post I link because it depends on what you want to count as being part of Maemo, but still more than I thought it was, follow the link he gives for details.

I.M.O. speaking as a lay man with a strong interest in nokia mobile phones and head tech guru for my family. I say maemo 5 is very stable (post PR 1.3 FW) but runs on under powered hardware ie processor and battery. I see little reason to throw good R&D money away by not putting out a maemo 6 decive that is an evolution of the much loved N900. It just seems on the surface to be a no brainer to just make hardware improvements on what has been a well received platform. Even te Americans took notice of maemo 5. I too can see that Meego is not ready but a reved up maemo is and could be done. The maemo UI is comparatively one of the best around and holds it's own. QT not only shows promise but appears to be ready to deliver (check out twimgo and GPodder versions rewitten in QT). I'm disappointed by Nokia people who ran things before Elop came because if OPK could have seen this our present I'm sure he would have pushed maemo development harder. Putting out different form factors and making maemo the primary OS with a view to leveraging QT on Symbian to retain customers and help the transition. Someone with some expertise please give feed back on this babble of mine.

150 million, not 15.