Free Your Phone

[Milan Votava]

At 20:21 22.1.2007, Dave Crossland wrote:
>On 22/01/07, Gervais Mulongoy <gervais.mulongoy at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>Sure they might take a few community-sponsored ideas and might
>>even claim them as their own (and sell new closed phones),
>
>If you write free software for the OpenMoko platform and use a good
>copyleft license like the GNU GPL, you can be sure that no one will
>ever distribute proprietary versions of it.
>
>--
>Regards,
>Dave


It's not about stealing ideas or work from a community. It's about 
using a community to do the job you normally have to pay for. How 
many units they are going to sell if there is only standard PIM & 
software suite available? Zero. If someone is going to increase the 
value of the device and making it competitive are developers who will 
make applications for the platform. You can hire these developers, to 
have them in house - in both cases you have to pay them OR you can 
use guys like us to do the job in our free time and just use and 
control our addiction to hack whatever has a cpu & ram. I think we 
are going to see this 'business model' more and more in coming years 
since a few companies (like http://www.slimdevices.com/) has made 
it's fortune from being bought by other old fashion companies (like 
logitech) after a community add a substantial value to the original 
subpar product or idea...

It's time now to get something back. It would be nice for a community 
developer to get a share of the company each time he/she makes a new 
'selling' application :-)


Milan