If I recall correctly

Epic Failure was predicted by most commentards here when the LiMo Consortium was first mooted.

I sure know that I predicted it.

I'm not surprised that this is the way it is panning out at all. Phone companies have never been good at software. They're to focused on feature checklists and until apple and android arrived their software was usually a hacked together afterthough that is shipped out as soon as it starts to "mostly work" with nary an update to be found.

There's a problem with most of these mobile OSS initiatives

For a lot of them the backing is 'All Mouth and No Trousers' (as an old student housemate from Bolton used to phrase it).

Providing anything of use requires work. Not powerpoint slides and meetings and press releases, but real work.

Real work means real engineers. Integrating what's already there needs an investment in engineers that are good at integration, not just 'it works in our company/team/my laptop'.

What Google have got right in Android is the fact that they have focused team to produce something that works on their reference device (and all the phones appear to be clones of that reference device with minimal changes). What happens in Microsoft is basically the same (and apple, obviously).

LiMo became unfortunately a talking shop, where nothing was ever delivered, or anything they did branch was so old they couldn't contribute to the upstream projects it was based on. As has been noted, the majority of contributions to linux come from a few people who are in well funded teams that are dedicated to keeping things current...