It’s gonna be a struggle, though. Meego is open source, but as far as I know, the “Harmattan” half of it is still property on Nokia. This probably means they won’t have rights to the Swipe-UI, an integral part of Meego-Harmattan, and the most beautiful feature of the N9, imho.

There’s also the entire matter of getting developers investors and on-board. If, as rumored, they’re leveraging the work done on Meego and the Mer Project, then their foundations are pretty good ones; Linux (no VM), QT/QML and HTML5. Developing on them should be way less cumbersome than it is to develop for Android. Problem is integration and marketing.

Then there’s the entire matter of hardware. Open development and a FOSS software stack are one thing, but convincing chipset OEMs to release specs and documentation is just as hard today as it was during the MS dominated desktop era. Licensing issues will also go some way in hampering the project. And then, if/when they finally release a Jolla handset, it’ll be a case of surviving the patent wars.

Don’t get me wrong. As a Linux and BSD user, I really want truly open, non-bastardized platforms like Jolla and Firefox OS to succeed, (If I see them mentioned on Kickstarter, I’ll definitely throw some money at them) but the challenges are immense so I’ll have to keep my enthusiasm/expectations in check till I see more concrete stuff out.