It's a matter of apparent perspective.

moblin.org was handled by Intel employees that could get into the strong confidentiality of the MeeGo pre-launch, and they are a nice % of Intel guys you are seeing.

There is plenty of Harmattan/MeeGo development from Nokia developers and surroundings at http://maemo.gitorious.org . They are public and visible, just not seen yet as MeeGo. It takes one MeeGo git repo and the move there. One of the many things in the queue.

It's been less than a week, and we are talking about drastic changes in working processes (while working at full speed, as usual).

Also I guess more developers from both sides will start showing up in MeeGo when the detailed architecture is published and the code infrastructure is in place with maintainers, specific lists / IRC channels and so on.

Not everybody is desperate showing up in a single generic crowded mailing list with plenty of noise and strong emotions. Even less if you are specialized professional developer. Even less if you carry a @nokia.com or @intel.com.

To me, it's like this slogan:

"I go, you go, they go, we all go for MeeGo, the family laxative for regular people who want to stay regular.

Camera pans over to toddler Johnny who has suddenly started walking away from the group. Announcer: "Johnny! Where are you going?" Johnny looks back with a little-boy smirk and says, "MeeGo!"

I don't know why a scrap wasn't thrown to the "community" by allowing it to share in the naming of the new entity.

This really is the bottom line and anyone who doesn't see this has missed the point completely.

Read this article. When I saw that the list of officially-supported platforms would be limited to iPhone, Android and Blackberry (not even Windows Mobile!), it was the first time I really felt sad that I owned an N900. While I appreciate that this example doesn't appy to everyone, it is but one example of how users of 'fringe' mobile platforms will continue to miss out on major developments as the industry continues to take off.

In this context, The MeeGo announcement shows that Nokia and Intel are actually thinking of their customers first (and therefore their own success) by creating a rival to the platforms cited above. Anything less will result in the death of their platforms.

Surely the litmus test of a platform's success is whether big names consider it worthy of their attention. At the moment the BBC, EA Games and other such developers won't touch Maemo with a bargepole and can you blame them? Nokia know this, and would rather make a massively-important strategic decision (which isn't even all that different from their existing one) rather than be self-indulgent.

Speaking of which, the only people who have any place being precious about an OS are the developers of that OS, not the developers for it. And from the announcement it sounds like those developers will be behind the new incarnation of this project.

Looking forward to the first release of MeeGo!

Only thing I have to say about that is "Why would I need an app for the BBC if I can just surf and see their WHOLE website?"

My favourite radio station came out with an APP. They want you to be a captive audience, use the app, and listen to ads and SEE ads in the app at the same time. Of course I found the stream address and use my Internet radio app and listen without the app anyway.

I much prefer the open standards that Nokia follows than encourage any app sillyness.

Fully agreed. Having a nice set of standards and functionalities built-in right into the platform is a lot better than "There's an App for that". My N900 can browse FaceBook via the browser and utilize Skype and FB Chat straight from the Conversations tool so I have zero need for applications for either of those.

Moblin also has a promising history of this, integrating lots of social web services into their desktop.

Interestingly enough, Windows Phone 7 also seems to be going this "platform instead of apps" route with their Hubs concept.

I hope all of these developments will eventually enlighten the users of "App phones" to switch over

Sorry don't have access to mailing lists at work. Is the UI a new unreleased one? Is theming the UI going to be possible? Anyway I can get details on the UI I would like to go ahead and start learning about themeing it now so when Meego comes out in a few months I will be ready to release some themes.

Who knows how much more buzz such a thing might have created...

Okay i fully appreciate the captive audience thing, otherwise I'd be an iPhone owner, right? My main concern with specific regard to the BBC is that the iPlayer doesn't work (saw in another thread this is to do with the site not recognising the N900 as a mobile device and dishing out the wrong video format), while the iPhone is recognised, and video works well. My main point was that without a significant user base, subtle irritations like this will continue to happen.

Maybe we will be able to watch the World Cup via the browser - live feeds of Final Score work great. We can always rely on radio streams if not.

Edit: someone has found a workaround to get the iPlayer working. I enjoy workarounds - was my job for 10 years - but there is a limit to which I'll put up with it.

Would the video play in Firefox properly?

Actually I have seen such an issue with my N810 even...one website would give me the Mobile version of it's site automagically. Drove me NUTS. I emailed and complained and they eventually fixed it. I didn't want to go the easy workaround route myself in that case.

That's actually a missed opportunity/could have been brilliant idea.

The result could hardly been worse than MeeGo, plus lots of free PR in techblogs towards people who would be ideal early adopters for MeeGo platform.