Although the merger of Maemo and Moblin has been announced, development of “Harmattan” (which would have been Maemo 6) is continuing. It is unclear exactly how Harmattan will be branded, it will not be known as Maemo, but it will be “MeeGo compatible” – using QT as it’s recommended application development framework.
Quim Gill posted some information on the Maemo forums:
For those caring about the platform in depth, Harmattan =! MeeGo. If we would make Harmattan identical to MeeGo then we would need to postpone dates and, really not for a good reason. Not a reason for app developers (the API is there anyway) and not a good reason for end users, who could not care less about packaging and some obscure middleware components. This is the only reason making Ari Jaaksi refer to Harmattan as a “MeeGo instance” instead of just “MeeGo product”.
This is why we are dropping the “Maemo 6″ *brand* while keeping all the Harmattan development full speed and in the same direction that it was.
It sounds as if Harmattan will be ‘an instance’ of MeeGo running on top of a Debian base. Other MeeGo instances will likely run on Intel’s Moblin base – as has already been announced.
Application developers who develop using QT should not have problems with either distribution, but there may be extra work involved in packaging for both ‘deb’ (Maemo) and ‘rpm’ (MeeGo) formats.