The Lost Openmoko Community

Sun Oct 5 07:27:43 CEST 2008

Hi Risto,
I think you depend upon Openmoko Inc. to "provide" the community. Or 
perhaps direction for the community.
I don't know if that's possible.
Community is, by definition, a bunch of different people, with 
different ideas and different requirements. Sure there may be some 
consensus, but there will also be plenty of people pulling in 
different directions, too.
Additionally, I think most of us, as Linux geeks, disagree with 
Openmoko Inc. on what software for our phones should look like. 
Openmoko want to sell their next generation of phones to little old 
ladies and teenagers, and are prepared to sacrifice complexity to do 
that. And they won't be asking the community how we want our phones - 
they will be following their own "vision" to achieve this. I won't by 
any means be relying on official distros to do what I want.
But what Openmoko HAS given us is wonderful, wonderful phone hardware 
which runs fully open-source software. I have realised that any 
criticism I might make of Openmoko must pale in comparison beside this 
- they're the ONLY people who have yet done so. (Perhaps we might 
mention the no-longer available Trolltech Greenphone, but that was 
only a run of 1000 units or so).
I appreciate that if you're not already a Linux / OSS fanboi, then the 
above statement might not mean much. What good is "fully open-source 
software", if it doesn't work, you say? Well, the benefit is that WE 
can make it work, and we don't have to reply upon Openmoko to help us.
Considering that the Freerunner is only - what? - 3 months old, the 
community has made leaps & bounds already. As others have pointed out, 
you can make a bug report over a spelling mistake, and I point to 
David Samblas' distro as an example of what the community has produced 
already.
I think that your problems stem from looking at "the Openmoko 
community" from the outside in. Only 3 months ago the first 5,000 or 
10,000 units of the Freerunner suddenly hit the market - of course the 
"direction" of development is going to be a mess. It's going to be 
impossible to look at just a wiki or two and try and get a handle of 
everything that's going on. And one shouldn't expect the impossible 
from Openmoko - to expect a unified direction of development you are 
asking someone to herd cats. Personally I don't want a single "true" 
distro, because we might end up with Gnome for phones. I prefer KDE 
and others here prefer Ice or whatever.
Rereading some of your questions, I did feel the same way myself a 
couple of months ago. "why don't the developers feel ok to contribute 
directly to 2007.x and 2008.x but 'fork' their own distros?" I have to 
say that I asked this myself, and I came to realise that that wouldn't 
suit the "Openmoko vision" for their own software. Just as you can't 
submit patches to Gnome to add right-click options if it doesn't meet 
with their "usability specification" or ask KDE to remove options 
because "they confuse my grandmother", some aspects of the Openmoko 
vision are indeed closed. But this free software lark gives us the 
CHOICE!
I feel that software images from Raster & David Samblas, the work 
being undertaken on SHR and the recent Qtopia release are all 
testaments to the community surrounding Openmoko's device(s), and if 
you appreciated how rapidly the situation with the software distos has 
improved in only a few weeks, you would realise that there are great 
things ahead for this platform. Yes, presently it may be frustrating 
for you, but even the person who makes a blog post about configuring 
their wifi under disto X, or changing the theme so that Navit displays 
better... those people are making a difference and improving the 
Freerunner environment for everyone.
Stroller.