There were Maemo and Moblin platforms from Nokia and Intel respectively. They both merged to form the Meego project under the governance of the Linux Foundation. Distributions such as openSUSE, Fedora, Debian tried to spin off Meego based derivatives and faced a lot of troubles.
Well known openSUSE rockstar Andrew Wafaa, overcame some of these troubles and did a distro release using these Meego packages on top of an openSUSE image. He named this distro "Smeegol" => SuSE + Meego. This effort by Andrew (and other distros) is a step in bringing the cool, shiny features of MeeGo to the masses, by riding on the large user-base of the existing distros. However, this has not went well with the linux foundation and they have asked to change the name of the project. They were afraid that Andrew using "Smeegol" will dilute the brand image of Meego.
Let us take a different case. "Linux " is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. If he has decided that nobody should be using the name "Linux" in their projects, We may not be able to use names such as "RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)", "SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLED/S)" etc. Allowing other people to use the name "Linux" (with due credits of course) has given it a widespread popularity. The Linux Foundation seems to be missing this point altogether and insists to move away from using {M,m}-e-e-{G,g}-o or any subset of those letters or sounds in that order, alone or in combination with other letters, words or marks that would tend to cause someone to make a reasonable connection of the reference with the MeeGo mark.
There are two problems here:
1) Anyone who hears about Smeegol will think about "Lord of the Rings" and not Meego. So, this should not affect LinuxFoundation at all. However, an even bigger problem is:
2) Should Linux Foundation take such a hard stand on maintaining the exclusivity of the "MeeGo " brand ?
With Android grabbing significant market share every day, I wonder why Linux Foundation insists on not playing well with the distros, with respect to Meego. There is a tweet from well-known kernel Hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman also expressing his unhappiness. However, it is not all gloomy and I believe that the linux foundation will fix these problems soonish.
Disclaimer: All opinions expressed are purely personal.