The MeeGo alpha tablet UX that Intel exhibited at Mobile World Congress 2011 drew a lot of attention at the time, most of it positive. But when eager developers learned that the code was being kept under wraps, many expressed an understandable disappointment.  The discourse on MeeGo mailing lists was civil but nonetheless underscored with frustration.  There was even talk of a community fork.

So today's revelation from Intel's Imad Sousou (the company's representative on the MeeGo Technical Steering Group) that the code would be opened was met with much relief.  His actual statement was:

Hi everyone... I know there are a lot of questions about the open sourcing of the meego tablet pre-alpha that was shown couple of weeks ago... I just want to let you know that we are planning on open sourcing the tablet UX code in the next few weeks.  This was planned to go open source at the same time we showed it, but given few complications, we had to delay this a bit...

Ultimately, this is great news for MeeGo and its enthusiastic community.  It demonstrates Intel's continual emphasis on open development processes.  The only caveat I'll throw in is that a lot of anxiety could have been avoided by improving the communications process.  ;)  Hopefully Imad will follow up soon with a formal post at meego.com.