Well, right, trademarks are a different story, but it's not related to if it's allowed/encouraged to do derivatives or not, and like I said Smeegol is not even a derivative AFAIK but MeeGo packages on top of openSUSE.
Fedora, Ubuntu etc. are similarly restricted in trademark use, and it's generally a very good thing for users to not be able to confuse unofficial releases/software products with the official ones. That's why we have stuff like Linux Mint.
MeeGo conference: Intel's and Nokia's visions of MeeGo
Posted Nov 25, 2010 21:15 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164)
[Link]
The point of the Smeegol comment was most likely how it was handled (which was quite horrible), not the principle itself (which does make sense). Note that there is now much better contact between the Smeegol dev's and MeeGo ppl so things will probably work out.