Possibilities for commercial software?

[Mike]

>
> The amount of applications available for the phone is not the goal;
> the goal is to have a 100% free software phone.
>

That is abosulutely not the goal. The goal actually IS a "[large] ammount
of applications available for the phone". If someone from OM chimes in and
says OSS-only really is the goal, I'll buy a Palm Treo tomorrow and never
look at this project again.  This way of thinking about the neo is a
microcosm of the problem with the linux community in general.

The linux community *overall* quietly wants linux to be a walled-off OSS
only world. They have never quite been comfortable with commercial apps
running on the linux platform.  And then they turn around and say things
like "Why do people still run windows? It's such a crappy OS, it's buggy
and slow and expensive and this and that. Oh well, it must be marketting
and monoply I guess."

It's not marketing. It's not monopoly.  It's the applications.  The reason
people run OSes is for the applications.  No one cares about the OS.  The
OS is just the stage, not the show, it's irrelevant.  I can't blame Adobe
for not supporting linux, given the massive fragmentation, the attitude
against commercial software, and the too-little-too-late feeble attempts
to be commercial-friendly like this:

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS4586903228.html

The appeal of openmoko isn't the linux, it's the DIY, homebrew,
third-party-application-friendliness. The goal is lots of apps.  If that
gets severed by more people of your thinking, and instead becomes
"only-OSS-third-party-application-friendliness", then we've got linux all
over again, and suffer the same marginalized fate of 0.39% (desktop
market) after a full 15 years.

To your earlier posts- it's called "Copyright" for a reason. "Copy".
"Right". As in, The Right To Copy something.  It's neither legal or
ethichal to make copies of copywritten material.  It's not "sharing files
with friends".  (I have my own separate set of ethics regarding music
copying but that's just me, and this email is too long already, so that
will be for another time.)

Finally I agree with 95% what David Schlesinger has said here so far (I
only veer about Apple), so ditto to you, David S, if you read down this
far.

m