No more optimization team

Jeremy McNaughton jeremy.mcnaughton at gmail.com
Tue Dec 16 11:32:36 CET 2008


Hi,

I just wanted to chime in on this.  I bought the phone not realizing
how useless as a phone it would be.  And now it's been months, and I
still can't rely on it as a phone.

I was, and still am, excited about writing some python apps for the
phone.  But frankly I don't see myself doing that until the phone
actually works.

Until then it sits on a shelf, only getting used every few weekends to
test a few images.  I'll keep checking the wiki and the lists to see
how things are going.  But I want to write apps, not troubleshoot
echoes and battery problems.

I think what Openmoko Inc. really needs is better community relations.
 It seems that a lot of the dissatisfaction in the community stems
from a feeling of being left out of the loop.  As a casual member of
the community, it is really hard to keep track of what is going on
with the project.

Looking from the outside, it really seems as though the Openmoko Inc.
team is working in isolation, cathedral style.

I would love to see company engineers and developers in constant
dialog with the community about the work they are doing on a daily
basis.  Many open source projects have a blog Planet site, where you
can read entries from developers explaining the bugs they are fixing
and features they are designing and implementing.  This sort of daily
interaction would beat a weekly single page of point form notes hands
down.

Sometimes it seems as though Openmoko is depending on community
members to fill roles such as maintaining the wiki.  For the past view
months that I've been reading the wiki and monitoring pages there has
been a lot of stale, outdated and confusing information.  At various
points it has been impossible for me to figure out which kernel to use
with which filesystem for a particular distro release within the
amount of time I can allot to Openmoko.

It looks like the future phone GUI we'll be using is Paroli, which is
part of Tichy.  Tichy looks really interesting, and will likely be a
major part of the Openmoko development platform.  If that's the case,
why has there been so little information about either project?

Openmoko you have this community of users who are still enthusiastic
about your product.  Do yourself a favour and learn how to keep us
interested by opening the lines of communication.  Look at other major
open source projects that have successfully cultivated active
communities around their products.  How did they do it?  Ubuntu's
community didn't happen by accident, it happened by design.


Jeremy McNaughton


On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 5:28 AM, David Garabana Barro
<david at garabana.com> wrote:
> On Thursday 11 December 2008 10:55:35 arne anka wrote:
>
>> sorry, but i fail to understand how this relates to the question of power
>> consumption.
>> and doesn't shr use fso as well?
>
> Sorry, I'm not explaying myself...
>
> #1024 is annoying me a lot for two reasons
>
> 1) If I want to receive calls with phone suspended, I have only one option:
> SHR
> As SHR is based in FSO, I suppose you're right, FSO should also work. But only
> SHR works "out of the box". I have tried FSO M4, but I haven't tried to force
> calypso to never deep sleep.
>
> 2) Not deep sleeping, power consumption is not optimal. I know continuously
> reconnecting consumes more power, but we're consuming more than necessary.
> And my battery lifetime is not the best in the world ;)
>
> I can live without PIM, without calendar, even without Doom ;), but I do need
> GSM telephony for my work.
> Having this bug solved, probably I could use FR as daily phone, and be more
> active on community. I think a lot other people are on the same situation as
> me.
>
> But, as you can read on Steve Mosher's answer, there is one person actively
> working on this bug. Great news!
>
> _______________________________________________
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> community at lists.openmoko.org
> http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
>




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