It will be official (ie. from Nokia) but there will be no official support - ie. don't bother calling the Nokia Helpline for assistance if an application is crashing or you have some other software related issue.

Since I imagine few of us needed to make this phone call with OS 2006 I don't see this as a big loss, and the announcement from Nokia is merely a disclaimer of sorts to cover their increased exposure to future software related issues. Software support (for both OS 2006 and the "Hacker Edition" OS 2007) will no doubt continue much as it does now - via the forums, newsgroups, bugzilla, blogs and IRC.

If you have a hardware problem however, you will continue to be fully supported by Nokia.

In terms of the future, Nokia have stated their intention to open the platform further so one can only hope that by the time Nokia firmware support finally comes to an end the community will be better placed to pick it up and continue.

Note also that Nokia are endeavouring to abstract the software from the hardware, so who knows we might even see OS 2008 "Hacker Edition" appear for the 770!