Does meego have a future?

Well nokia has turned their back on meego.  But does this mean the end of the mobile open source operating system?

Without nokia i reckon it might stand a better chance of succeeding.  Nokia has changed direction so many times in the past 3 years that there was the chance that they would destroy or cripple meego before it took off.  They had symbian as their top priority.  They created maemo.  They open sourced symbian.  They merged maemo with moblin and created meego.  They dropped meego and symbian and are now going with windows phone 7.  Headless chickens have better direction.

• Meego may survive as a distro especially for low powered hardware. It is considerably more open than android and not encumbered by java or the patent wars that seem to haunt android.
• Meego may survive as a embedded systems os.  There is talk of it as an in car computer system.  A niche market but one that resists change.
• Meego may survive if it can be put in place of android os on any of the tablets that come out and be shown to be superior on the same hardware.  It was designed with tablets in mind so it wouldn't need much in the way of alterations.  If enough hackers adopt it on cheap android hardware it may gain a community independent of hardware manufacturers.
• Meego may survive if instead of android it gains traction in the chinese cheap mobile market.

That's 4 ifs to start with.  It would only take one of them to come to pass to ensure the survival of the os.  Open source software has a habit of sticking around as long as there is a use for it.  It's not dependent on a single company to keep it alive.  If it can survive it can thrive.