Nokia's MoeeGo team has left the company and created a start-up called Jolla Ltd to build on top of MeeGo. Nokia has been severely criticized for ditching all of its open source projects and turned the company into a Microsoft's Pizza delivery boy. Instead of going with Android or company's own MeeGo, ex-Microsoft execute Stephen Elop adopted Microsoft's failed Windows platform. MeeGo based N9 was a massive success, but Elop declared that even if N9 succeeds they will not divert from their Microsoft plan. N9's success proved that MeeGo holds great potential.

Now, the ex-Nokia executives are reviving MeeGo with their Finland-based start-up Jolla Ltd.

According to their LinkedIn page:

Jolla Ltd. is an independent Finland based smartphone product company which continues the excellent work that Nokia started with MeeGo. The Jolla team is formed by directors and core professionals from Nokia's MeeGo N9 organisation, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities.

Nokia created something wonderful - the world's best smartphone product. It deserves to be continued, and we will do that together with all the bright and gifted people contributing to the MeeGo success story.

Together with international private investors and partners, Jolla Ltd. will design, develop and sell new MeeGo based smartphones. The Jolla team consists of a substantial number of MeeGo's core engineers and directors, and is aggressively hiring the top MeeGo talent to contribute to the next generation smartphone production.

What's interesting is after Nokia's exit Intel got Samsung as the partner to build on top of MeeGo. The new project sponsored and hosted by The Linux Foundation was re-named Tizen and MeeGo seems to be competing with it.

It will be interesting to see what strategy Jolla has to compete in this highly volatile market. Who will be the third player on the mobile space -- Tizen, Firefox OS or MeeGo?