Request for help: Would like community applications to show anddiscuss at LinuxWorld

[David Pottage]

On Wed, July 30, 2008 9:07 am, Sean Moss-Pultz wrote:

> I will not reply to comments like these in detail. You would not
> understand.

Sean:

Ad homen attacks aside, you need to respond in public to Marcus's
substantive points. He is an important community developer, and he is
expressing real issues that are widely felt. Tango GPS is a killer
application for OpenMoko, and if we loose it, then we substantially
weaken the platform, you should think very carefully before burning
that bridge.

I don’t think it was helpful for him to insult you, I guess he was
angry, but regardless his points about getting a working platform now
are important. You want to build up a community around OpenMoko, from
which you hope will flow lots of useful applications. You where very
successful in doing that before the hardware was released, but now that
it has, and thousands of enthusiast have put down a months rent on a
unit of hardware there is widespread frustration.

None of us expected an iPhone like polished and fully integrated
software stack, but we did expect a developer friendly platform with
some basic functionality that would mostly work. Instead the software
distributions are forked 5 ways, and none of them work. I am sure I am
not the only person who is disinclined to put any effort into finding
or fixing the many bugs because I have no idea which distributions will
emerge from the mess.

You hope that the community to come up with lots of useful applets and
full applications, to run on the first open cell phone. For that to
happen most people will be 'scratching an itch' The problem is that
they will not chose to use an OpenMoko to scratch that itch unless they
are carrying it with them, which won't happen until basic phone
functionality is working, and most enthusiasts are carrying their
OpenMoko as their personal phone. The Wiki and Mailing lists are
absolutely brimming with ideas, many of which would be quick to code in
a scripting language, but none of this will happen until the basics are
there.

As Marcus says, the staff a OpenMoko need to put FSO/ASU aside for a
while at least and refocus on getting working phone functionality from
OM2007.2 as soon as possible. All the design docs are already there on
the Wiki and have been for 18 months, it just needs implementing. Once
the ecosystem has been started properly you can spend time if you must
on your blue sky projects with their clever design.

-- 
David Pottage

Error compiling committee.c To many arguments to function.