Well, part of the issue there might have been that when someone in community gets good enough at something, well, they got hired by Nokia or other companies in the open source ecosystem

But frankly: the way maemo.org is organised and is run is not very project-oriented and lends to way too much bikeshedding. Even in old Mer we chose a completely different working method than the rest of the community.

While the open source community does seem like the greatest thing ever which can accomplish everything under the sun, it all bends down to three things: time, money and focus.

Personally, these days I think the best product communities are the ones that operate like a proper open source project, but also has people from companies contributing within it. Mer has that, now, too. I've been involved with companies which function as open source communities internally as well - it's sometimes about the working method.

Even in big and known open source projects, go look closer at the actual contributors and you'll find many small to medium businesses, or even big corporations. .. and often that these contributions from small companies turn out to be paid work by the bigger ones.

If you believe you can do better than Nokia, have the community start one or more companies, work together in a proper open source way on common items, gain investments, etc. You can't easily put out actual mobile products on the market without actual $$$.