That's the one weak point of the whole "GNU/Linux" thing. On the other hand: GNOME itself says it's part of the GNU project (I'm told there's not cooperation whatsoever, but as long as it's on their homepage I take it for granted ...), so we needn't call it "GNOME/X11/GNU/Linux/Whatever", only "X11/GNU/Linux/Whatever". And we can still drop the "Linux"-part once HURD gets stable (rumors have it Pandora will ship with HURD)... leaving GNU/X11/Whatever. That's acceptable.
RMS would call it so in analogy, maybe. But the reverse analogy is much more tempting: If people accept calling Android Android (and not Android/Linux), I might try to push the term "GNU" instead of "GNU/Linux"... Same logic, the other way round.
(And it's all your fault if people don't understand me any more then: you made me think of all this !)

Well, you probably should mention that Nokia is encouraging the development of Mer, which is kinda like OpenMoko for Maemo -- they're pretty hardcore about the "truly open" stuff...

while i cant point to an exact satement right now, my understanding is that the android dev phone is fully working. just slot a sim and go.

and from what i understand, mer will work on the 770 to...

Probably I should, yes. While Mer as such is not part of the presentation, the fact that it's really encouraged and supported by Nokia does tell a lot about the mindset of the company.

That's true but it isn't fully open. It's an unlocked phone SIM wise but it still needs some closed source binaries for OpenGL and GSM. If download the source from source.android.com, build it and flash your device you won't be able to make calls, use gmail (at least the native client. It will still work in the browser) or app market and some codecs will be missing

So that would be interesting to find out and have backed by sources. "I'll have to ask Google" gets an nice double meaning here.....

EDIT: "Ask ekul" did the trick. No need to ask Google.

Just wanted to return to this thread to say "Thank you" to all of you who helped. I think my presentation went really well; we made a last minute change and did it on Monday rather than Friday, allowing for one of my other collegues to bring his G1. So we sat there, the people could play with both devices afterwards (my N800 and the G1), it was really cool.

It's a series of presentations we do in-house about topics that are not really part of our daily work (that would be normal trainings), but are somehow related and might be of interest to those who want to know a little more than they necessarily need to know.
People are invited to participate, but it's not considered payed work time. Therefore, we usually have a small audience (5-15), but those who come are really interested.

My Maemo/Android/OpenMoko-talk attracted 11 people (actually 10 plus the one who brought his G1 ). All of them, of course, knew Android. About half of them had heard about the N800, but didn't associate the "Maemo" brand with anything. Three knew about OpenMoko.

The nice thing was that it didn't end up with people arguing about which one is better. (Except me telling them Maemo was best, of course, but I think they pretty soon ignored that ). It was a very interesting evaluation of strengths and weaknesses.

Most important: I was able to answer almost all questions, except the one that we all know: "What is Maemo good for? What's its place in the Nokia strategy? Will it become a phone OS someday?" - Well... Nothing new for us.