Huh? The N900 was released in 2009. The N9 program was launched some time before that, and the device was released, after all, in late 2011.

What alternative timeline you live in? The turn was announced on February 2011. The first Lumia was released in November the same year.

You didn't refer me to anything. The only design page I came upon was this one, and it does not yet have any detailed plans for middle-click.

You can follow a workflow of painstakingly designing and documenting every commit in the development head, but I don't think every project does. And the commit in question was indeed found to be premature and removed by one of the developers, well before it became a front-page story for the hate brigade.

It does not go into any detail on that, yet.

Can you point at exactly the instances where anybody remotely relevant to GNOME development is publicly proposing the things you have mentioned? All factual evidence so far is a reverted commit.

Just to prevent as much tedious unnecessary rageposting as I can, here's a mailing list post from one of the developers:

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2013-September/msg00065.html

See, this whole story is blown out of thin air. Almost everybody commenting to this Slashdot story have shown themselves to be knee-jerk idiots with no capacity for critical thought. YOU CAN GO HOME NOW. Or better, finally fuck off and forget about all things GNOME. Both you and the GNOME project will be better off this way. Ah well, who am I kidding, this stupid shit has been going on ever since GNOME (and KDE, for its own part) was released.

They did. They also know that C++ is a bad language for that, so much so that programming object-oriented constructs in C is better.

If by "basically available" you mean being able to boot up and run a few carefully chosen smoke tests, then yeah. As a product ready to go to market, no way in hell.

Regardless, the "oh shit moment" leading to cancelling MeeGo happened some weeks before the announcement, and it was caused by the fact that no matter what shape the N9 was in, the actual MeeGo platform to be developed for years to come was in total shambles and not scheduled to be ready until late 2011 at the earliest.

I had the N9 too, and I had the Lumia 800. The one that didn't cause me to miss calendar appointments won. Guess which one it was. Sorry, the nice UI was not enough, neither was Linux inside (is it ever), and Windows Phone UI is arguably even better.

I used WebOS in a figurative sense: an also-ran mobile OS that was too little, too late.
They muddled the lineage by banding up with Intel, meaning that the platform was going to be rebased on Moblin.

Revisionism. The strategy change announcement was made half a year before the N9 was released. And well before Elop, it was decided internally that the software on the N9 is a one-off with no future, because MeeGo proper was being developed in parallel, with a late 2011 shipping date in mind (yes, that's when they shipped the Lumia 800 after the big turnaround). See, Nokia was really big on nonsensical parallel development back then. Anyone who knows the development story of the N900 and the N9 can confirm that.

This is a myth created by Tomi Ahonen and a few commenters on a tech blog.

You mean the phones that are still supported and getting newly released apps? Keep telling that to people stuck on buggy Gingerbread phones.

Taking Nokia board's intent at face value, Elop was invited to do something to help the situation. Once they'd decided to concentrate on Windows Phone, they became so dominant on the platform that the other WP OEMs started having second thoughts. So Nokia's devices unit became a more and more attractive purchase target as it went along. Keeping the R&D diverse might have been a good hedge against that, but it does not look like a good business strategy to me: after all, companies exist to make money, not to shit into their books for the specific purpose of staying independent.

Selling the unit to Microsoft might have been the plan B from the beginning, too. But I think it's naive to assume that Nokia's board and shareholders fell victim to the evil scheming M$.

A good one-liner. Now honestly, have you ever tried to build and run that on a hardware of your choice?

MeeGo was another WebOS: late, buggy, and basically going nowhere with the organization they had and the cannon ball of Intel shackled to their leg.

Nokia would have made a glorious last stand with it, open source geeks would support them (never mind an occasional grumble about the bugs, wanton platform changes, and closed components, what's this between friends), but in the end it wouldn't bring bread to the table without substantial cultural changes and a lot of development. Yes, I'm familiar with The Legend of Spectacular N9 Sales.

Yeah, the conspiracy theory is now cemented. Impossible to prove or disprove, and just too likable to not believe.

It's not even proper engineer's mindset. An engineer speaks from field experience, or at least knowledge verified by past experimentation.

This is just some armchair know-it-all, like a lot of people commenting on Slashdot. A software engineer, more likely.

That's funny, but PGP was designed with the assumption that communications and email storage can easily be snooped on. It's an end-to-end scheme, and so is S/MIME. The security of both is as good as the encryption algorithm and your and your peers' procedures for key management and exchange.

If a government (to me, the U.S. government agencies are agents of a foreign state) wants the contents, they need to go after you, rather than installing blanket wiretaps at your service providers and silencing their staff with a secret gag order.