Free Your Phone

[Simon]

On 1/22/07, Milan Votava <votava at mageo.cz> wrote:
> 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.

This is the reason I don't feel particularly inclined to develop for
maemo, because my impression is that not enough of the code is free to
make the OS very useful on any other device.  However, as long as
OpenMoKo is all free (I'm willing to make an exception for the GPS
daemon, because it's not an integral part of the rest of the OS), and
not intentionally designed to be unportable, then it can be reused,
and represents a genuine contribution to the community.  As long as
this is true, there are no grounds for a claim that FIC is exploiting
developers for free labour.  FIC is _providing_ a hardware platform
that is useful to free software developers, who now have the option to
develop code for it.  Hardware that supports free software is _never_
a bad thing, and the people that create open hardware are usually
doing it because they also like free software.