Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973
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Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973
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Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973
#2It had vision but lacked constraints. The open source bazaar style development delivered 9 projects completed to 10% instead of one completed to 90%. The whole "enlightenment vs qt vs gtk" ui environment all half baked and with spotty feature coverage...
But hey, they were the ones that tried.
Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973
#3I had a Openmoko Neo1973, I managed to make a call on it once!
Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973
#4It had vision but lacked constraints. The open source bazaar style development delivered 9 projects completed to 10% instead of one completed to 90%. The whole "enlightenment vs qt vs gtk" ui environment all half baked and with spotty feature coverage... But hey, they were the ones that tried.
1) There are still ongoing efforts, including Plasma Mobile.
2) The whole "Qt vs. GTK+" worked perfectly fine on desktop. We have several kickass graphical user interfaces on the desktop.
3) What is preventing FOSS on phones is not software stacks. It's the closed hardware.
Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973
#5The thing is, the world still needs a genuinely open smart-phone. OK, you can pull teeth to root your Android phone and install that successor-to-Cyanogenmod-thing, but we're still far from the openness of the PC ecosystem. Remember being able to build a PC from parts bought piecemeal from ads in Computer Shopper, then install your choice of Microsoft DOS, FreeDOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, Solaris x86, OS/2 Warp, BeOS, Minix, Netware, etc., etc? Sure, getting audio and accelerated graphics to work could be a PITA for some combinations, and network card drivers were kinda iffy on Linux a long time ago... but still, by and large, it was YOUR machine and you could run whatever OS you wanted on it and do whatever you wanted with it. The shortcomings w/r/t drivers and what-not were usually the result of apathy (eg, manufacturers not shipping Linux drivers or OS/2 drivers because of lack of perceived demand) rather than outright attempts to stop you from running Linux, OS/2, etc.
Sadly, it doesn't look like we'll ever be able to build our own smartphones from components, but it would be nice if we could at least get manufacturers to stop actively blocking attempts to run alternate software and what-not. :-(
Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973
#6As a Google Summer of Code student way back in 2008 for Openmoko, this brought a lot of memories :).
Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973
#7The thing is, the world still needs a genuinely open smart-phone. OK, you can pull teeth to root your Android phone and install that successor-to-Cyanogenmod-thing, but we're still far from the openness of the PC ecosystem. Remember being able to build a PC from parts bought piecemeal from ads in Computer Shopper, then install your choice of Microsoft DOS, FreeDOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyB…
Mobile hardware is a nightmare. The best thing we have to cope with it, so far, is libhybris. And I don't see things getting much better.
All we have is Pyra, the incoming Neo900 and semi-closed Jollas with Sailfish.
Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973
#8The thing is, the world still needs a genuinely open smart-phone. OK, you can pull teeth to root your Android phone and install that successor-to-Cyanogenmod-thing, but we're still far from the openness of the PC ecosystem. Remember being able to build a PC from parts bought piecemeal from ads in Computer Shopper, then install your choice of Microsoft DOS, FreeDOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyB…
Mobile hardware is a nightmare. The best thing we have to cope with it, so far, is libhybris. And I don't see things getting much better. All we have is Pyra, the incoming Neo900 and semi-closed Jollas with Sailfish.
The Pyra is not going to be released anytime soon, the Neo900 is overpriced... but we do have Plasma Mobile running on a few devices.
Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973
#9The thing is, the world still needs a genuinely open smart-phone. OK, you can pull teeth to root your Android phone and install that successor-to-Cyanogenmod-thing, but we're still far from the openness of the PC ecosystem. Remember being able to build a PC from parts bought piecemeal from ads in Computer Shopper, then install your choice of Microsoft DOS, FreeDOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyB…
Mobile hardware is a nightmare. The best thing we have to cope with it, so far, is libhybris. And I don't see things getting much better. All we have is Pyra, the incoming Neo900 and semi-closed Jollas with Sailfish.
There's a "collaborative project to unify the Hardware Abstraction Layer for projects which run GNU/Linux on mobile devices with pre-installed Android" called Halium.
Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973
#10It had vision but lacked constraints. The open source bazaar style development delivered 9 projects completed to 10% instead of one completed to 90%. The whole "enlightenment vs qt vs gtk" ui environment all half baked and with spotty feature coverage... But hey, they were the ones that tried.
I'm following https://ubports.com/ with hope.