There has been a lot of confusion regarding this post on NVIDIA's Tegra developer forum that was misconstrued as vaguely implying NVIDIA would stop supporting the "Harmony" generation of Tegra devices going forward (ViewSonic gTablet, Notion Ink Adam, ViewSonic ViewPad 7, Advent Vega, and others) and would instead only stick to the "Ventana" generation. Rather than panicking and freaking out, we pinged our contact at NVIDIA to get a straight answer and held off until we heard the official response.
To clear up the air right off the bat - the issue was blown way out of proportion and in no way pertains to actual production devices. What the NVIDIA forum rep was talking about was simply dropping support for the "Harmony" development kit, which is literally a quasi-tablet board and is only meant to be used by developers and manufacturers for initial development and testing. It's essentially a base reference implementation to be used before actual devices for that platform are created, but no products are even based off of it, as all of them are created in a custom manner.
In short, it means there are no production Harmony devices. Period.
The Ventana development kit, which was the next generation reference spec, will still be fully supported going forward. EOLing an old development product is very common, but NVIDIA's unfortunate choice of words pushed the situation out of control.
Here's what NVIDIA had to say, which should end any sorts of confusion:
A lot has been read into a very short post about a Tegra development kit. I'd like to clear up a few points.
First, nothing changes in what we’re delivering to the open source community or customers. NVIDIA will continue to post the Tegra kernel to kernel.org and publish our Android code to our public git servers. Additionally, we will continue to make our BSP (codecs, GPU driver etc) available to all our hardware partners. We will continue to do this and nothing about these processes has changed.
For our partners' Android devices, NVIDIA provides support until the hardware partner chooses to no longer support the device. So, for instance, NVIDIA will support the Xoom on all versions of Android Motorola requests until Motorola ceases to support the Xoom. The same goes for ViewSonic with the G-Tablet, Notion Ink with the Adam, Acer with the Iconia, LG with the Optimus 2X and so on.
In relation to my original reply, that was a response to a specific question about a Tegra 250 Development Kit. Given the confusion, we will work with owners of Tegra 250 Development Kits individually to determine their needs. The term "Harmony" is an internal codename for the Tegra 250 Development Kit. It is not a tablet reference design. Each shipping tablet is a custom design with varying hardware components and requires a custom OS image from the OEM who made the tablet.
Finally, while we cannot support or give out third party peripheral drivers or provide the Android 3.0 source before Google does, we do want to explore whether we can assist the open source ROM makers. We will be reaching out to them today.
Andrew Edelsten
Tegra Developer Relations
NVIDIA Corporation
So, your Adams and you gTablets will be just fine - NVIDIA is going to keep supporting every single one of them until the manufacturers cut the cord themselves.
Source: NVIDIA