thanks nokia! this is very good!

Maybe people should join the Garage project in droves and exert pressure there ? :-)

https://garage.maemo.org/projects/os2007on770/

Sounds promising but there is a saying in the US that goes "I've from the Missouri state, Show Me". So I'm somewhat skeptical that this isn't just some talk to appease irate 770 owners that never actually goes anywhere.

This all sounds like a contradiction.

NOKIA continues the development but it is not official and a HACKER edition. How can this be ??? I thought the device was made by NOKIA.

From my viewpoint only full support makes sense. Either full support from NOKIA or full support of a community driven distro.

They can stop the the hacker edition whenever they want and they will do this (again) after a short period of time.

They can only make money by selling hardware ...

It will be official (ie. from Nokia) but there will be no official support - ie. don't bother calling the Nokia Helpline for assistance if an application is crashing or you have some other software related issue.

Since I imagine few of us needed to make this phone call with OS 2006 I don't see this as a big loss, and the announcement from Nokia is merely a disclaimer of sorts to cover their increased exposure to future software related issues. Software support (for both OS 2006 and the "Hacker Edition" OS 2007) will no doubt continue much as it does now - via the forums, newsgroups, bugzilla, blogs and IRC.

If you have a hardware problem however, you will continue to be fully supported by Nokia.

In terms of the future, Nokia have stated their intention to open the platform further so one can only hope that by the time Nokia firmware support finally comes to an end the community will be better placed to pick it up and continue.

Note also that Nokia are endeavouring to abstract the software from the hardware, so who knows we might even see OS 2008 "Hacker Edition" appear for the 770!

I am glad that Nokia has decided to continue 770 development. I am still going to be very hesitant to recommend the 770/800 to people until I see them deliver on their words. I think the best thing they could do to regain people's confidence is to truly open source the platform, so that the community could continue to develop for it in the future. People need more than just assurances that if they buy a $400 device, they are going to be able to make productive use of it for more than just a few years.