The Linux-based MeeGo mobile operating system faces an uncertain future amid rumors that Intel plans to back away from the platform. The troubled open source software project has failed to gain broad industry support and appears to be slowing down in the face of weak demand and declining engagement from its backers.

Intel denied the rumors today, saying that it is still "fully committed" to MeeGo and intends to continue developing the platform while searching for new partners. Intel's "commitment" doesn't mean much in practice, however, because the company's development efforts to date have done little to advance the project. Unless Intel can attract a partner that is better equipped to produce consumer-facing software, MeeGo doesn't have much of a future as a discrete mobile platform.

The MeeGo project launched last year when Intel and Nokia decided to bring together their respective mobile Linux operating systems and create a unified platform. They invited the Linux Foundation to provide vendor-neutral stewardship for the project in order to make it more inclusive and attract additional contributors. At the time, it seemed like a very promising initiative with a clear path for creating an upstream-aligned mobile Linux platform targeted at regular consumers.

Sadly, MeeGo has largely failed to live up to its potential. Development moved slowly because endless bikeshedding impaired efforts to reconcile technical differences between the disparate Nokia and Intel software components. When Nokia finally started to make meaningful progress on the MeeGo smartphone stack, CEO Stephen Elop abruptly changed course and decided to align the company with Microsoft's Windows Phone 7—effectively ending Nokia's commitment to MeeGo.

Although Intel has poured considerable financial resources into MeeGo, the company has little to show for it today. Intel's netbook software environment was once very promising and could have been great, but it never quite advanced to the level of maturity that it needed in order to be truly competitive. Intel made a good start, but didn't follow through or commit sufficient resources to take to completion.

The MeeGo netbook environment got a second chance with the intervention of Novell, which refocused the development effort and led to an overhaul that brought in more mature components from the upstream ecosystem. In the wake of Attachmate's recent acquisition of Novell, it seems unlikely that the Linux distributor will be able to continue picking up Intel's slack in MeeGo.

Without meaningful support, the MeeGo netbook environment is beginning to stagnate and fall behind alternatives. Ubuntu's Unity shell and the upstream GNOME Shell both offer a better user experience on netbooks and benefit from more active development. Hardware vendors that still want to ship Linux netbooks can offer consumers better software by using conventional Linux distributions instead of MeeGo.

Intel's tablet environment for MeeGo is even worse off than the netbook environment. The current implementation is still little more than a proof-of-concept. It doesn't seem like it's on a trajectory to ever be shipped on real hardware.

It's increasingly clear that Intel won't produce a complete user-ready mobile software environment on its own. It wasn't willing to invest the necessary resources before and certainly isn't now. If Intel's performance up to this point is any indication, the company's "commitment" to MeeGo means very little. Intel will likely continue to provide a token level of support for the project in order to keep it on life support in case someone else comes along and decides to do the actual work.

Some reports suggest that Samsung, which is soon launching a MeeGo-based netbook, might step up to collaborate with Intel. That would be a welcome change, because the involvement of another major hardware vendor would improve MeeGo's chances of getting back on track. Samsung builds devices with a variety of form factors and could benefit from having a single platform that can span all of them. It's worth noting, however, that Samsung already has a fairly diverse platform strategy and might not want to take on yet another. The company won't comment on the matter.

The challenges that MeeGo now faces are unfortunate. There is still a very clear need in the market for a truly open mobile operating system with an inclusive governance model. MeeGo could have filled that need and raised the bar for openness and transparency in the mobile space. As the project falters, it seems increasingly unlikely that it will have the opportunity to bring the much-needed disruption that it once promised.