Building Qt debs "the easy way"
Although most packages for Maemo should be being uploaded as source tarballs to the Extras autobuilder, there is usually need to build binary debs which you can copy to your device for initial testing. Tam Hanna has posted a guide to doing just that using Nokia's multi-platform Qt SDK: The latest versions of Nokia's Qt SDK (you MUST run the updater to get the latest MADDE before step 1) contain a fully-featured .deb generator when building for a Nokia N900. Unfortunately, fully-featured does not equal working - which is why the tutorial below has been created to fill in the blanks. It provides me with packages which can be installed, and show up in the Maemo menu - as soon as I hear more from Ovi, I will update this segment. Details about the Ovi submission process are hard to come by, but it seems that binary packages are uploaded there. The information in this guide (and in Ville's comment) may well prove useful to developers trying to target that, rather than the community repos.
What's the status of the Maemo licensing change request queue?
Quim Gil provides us with an overview of the licensing change change request queue status that boils down to a few points: [...] opening legacy software takes resources appointed elsewhere, and in some cases we would do it if someone would push and do the actual job. [...] a proposal for the role of the distmaster [was pushed] [...] [it was] agreed with Carsten to fund his role as maemo.org distmaster. [...] He gets access to some old and fresh code, plus Nokia internal contacts and info. [...] Then MeeGo is launched, picking by surprise everybody. I can't remember now, but I believe Carsten was not aware at all. [Carsten starts] playing with the N900 port and the MeeGo OBS. He is offered more work and responsibilities within the MeeGo project - basically a full time job. In the meantime both the core Mer guys and Nokia people like Tero or myself get convinced that the best technical and tactical way to address openness in the tablets and the N900 is to follow the MeeGo development mainline, adapting it to this hardware. Nokia is opening a lot of functionality for MeeGo Handset and the MeeGo project has chosen the N900 as official ARM platform. The current is favourable in that direction and Nokia is putting serious resources in that direction with the MeeGo N900 port. In effect, there won't be many resources (if any) put towards openning additional Maemo 5 components, as the belief is that MeeGo is the best way forward (whether or not that actually brings a day-to-day usable experience).