Wiki Editing Guidelines

[Attila Csipa]

On Monday 19 February 2007 16:19, Ian Stirling wrote:
> While I am very grateful to FIC for their involvement in OpenMoko, if
> someone came up with mostly comparable open hardware with Wifi,
> available at a similar time, and it wasn't too much more expensive...

From what I see that is exactly the reason why OpenMoko is linked to FIC as 
closely as it is now - you don't have an alternative and someone at FIC at 
least had the guts to make a try. No other manufacturer shows any serious 
interest in developing an open source solution, AFAICT Motorola basically 
just uses Linux as a buzzword. No linux apps or api there, that's why OpenEZX 
was born, and some of the key figures of OpenMoko could talk about how 
painful hacking Motorola stuff was/is and how far from general use it is even 
now. As it is turning out, a lot of software people here don't really know 
how hardware development works in the real world, and want a stable software 
platform, the best spec for hardware, want it to be cheap, (and they want it 
now). This is a 'pick two of these' thing, and since it's a much more 
consumer oriented thing than what your average OSS project encounters we have 
quite a few cases of too high expectations - people who don't want a Neo1973 
(whatever its specs are), they want a dreamphone (see the list of four above) 
and they hope the Neo1973 matches up (as in - we want HARDWARE, and if it can 
be Open, all the better, instead of saying we want an Open platform and if it 
has the best hardware, all the better). Do you buy your computer hardware so 
it works on your OS, or do you choose your OS so it could work with the nifty 
hardware you read about on that heavily subsidized review site ? Yes, I might 
like wifi and powered usb and a 3.5 split jack with but still, the bottom 
line is: DO YOU WANT AN OPEN PHONE ? I feel the community (the people posting 
here) still do not quite grasp what that means. It has nothing to do with 
802.11, gigabytes or megapixels. So far this is more of a 
whatdoyoumiss at openmoko than community at openmoko. _COMPLAINING_ is the most 
idiotic thing you can do in an Open Source Project. Give a suggestion (after 
reading the FAQ-s of course :), fork the project, make another from scratch, 
but don't put pressure on people who work on Free stuff just because you 
don't like the way they do it. So, enough with ranting, FIC, just let us have 
the Free Phone you promised and let us do the rest. 

> If Motorola were to open the A1200, for example, it'd be a temptation.
> (not very much, I'd really quite like GPS)

IIRC the A1200 has no wifi... In fact, I'm not sure why it would be more of a 
temptation than any other phone would be as it's mostly on par or weaker 
spec't than the FIC apart from the camera.