FreeRunner delayed a further 6 months?!?!??

[Mark Haury]

Marcin Juszkiewicz openembedded at haerwu.biz wrote on Sun Mar 16 
11:02:12 CET 2008

On Saturday 15 of March 2008, Mark Haury wrote:
 >> In order for there to be "competition", there has to be something
 >> available. The Trolltech Greenphone comes to mind, though, as its
 >> availability matches the Freerunner's at this point. Not to mention
 >> that's the origin of Qtopia that everybody seems to be running on their
 >> Neos rather than OpenMoko. That's more than a little revealing...>
 >
 >Greenphone is past now. Even Trolltech does not use it as developer
 >platform - they switched to Neo1973 few months ago.

Exactly my point: the Greenphone hardware is *just* as available as Neo
hardware at this point, since both have been sold out for some time and 
there's no telling when GTA02 might be available. And the fact that people
are inclined to use Qtopia rather than Openmoko reveals something about the
the status of Openmoko...

The only difference between the Greenphone and the Neo at this point is that
Trolltech have publicly announced that the Greenphone is not going to be
produced anymore, whereas Openmoko keep promising (but not delivering) more
hardware. It's the *promise* of the resumption of production of hardware 
that
keeps them actively developing Qtopia for the Neo.

It seems to me that continued production of the flawed GTA01 hardware would
have been preferable to nothing at all. And unless there's some extremely
serious problem with GTA02 that they're not telling us, they certainly could
have released it to developers before now. It is *abundantly* clear to
everyone that the software and probably the hardware is not ready for 
consumer
release, but without allowing developers to evaluate and help, it never will
be. The core FIC-employed group is much too small to do it all by 
themselves,
regardless of how brilliant and competent they are. It's not their technical
expertise that is being questioned, just their business sense.

It all boils down to the premise upon which this project is supposedly 
based:
is it "open", or not?

Mark

P.S. If Nokia does in fact take over Trolltech as is rumored, this might all
be moot in short order. I warned a long time ago about the window of
opportunity...