[Gta04-owner] Discussion: what are your dreams for the Openmoko Community

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Am 01.05.2012 um 05:46 schrieb NeilBrown:

> On Mon, 30 Apr 2012 07:38:13 +0200 "Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller"
> <hns at goldelico.com> wrote:
> 
>> Wow,
>> this is a really impressive list with new ideas
>> I have not yet heard of!
>> 
>> And the most interesting thing is that I think
>> almost all can be done and don't have major
>> technical hurdles to overcome. The main
>> challenge is to make them user friendly
>> and bug free.
>> 
>> It appears that we more have a lack of active
>> developers doing it. And are missing some
>> coordination to get a complete solution.
>> 
>> Maybe we should again think about a more
>> formal organization of the Openmoko.org
>> (software) project?
>> 
>> Some Foundation or Association?
> 
> What benefit would a Foundation or Association bring?
> I think they bring value in co-ordination when you have lots of people who
> are finding it difficult to work together.  But I don't think that is the
> problem that we have.  As you said: "lack of active developers".

Hm. I think we *have* a problem finding people to work together.
Is there a roadmap? Are there big visible and coordinated activities
to recruit new developers on big events like FOSDEM, LinuxTag etc.?

I think a foundation/association can help here because it has the ability to
collect some money and distribute to specific efforts. And can elect
persons to do something...

Currently, all developers (and marketeers) are pure volunteers driven
by their own agenda. Although this allows impressive progress in some
areas just because it is not coordinated (like your or Radek's work) it
has limits if we want to maintain and improve the overall quality of the
software stacks. And get the visibility of e.g. Debian or Suse.

I regularily hear complaints that the (user space) software isn't complete,
is broken in areas that had been working before, important features are
missing etc.

Well, this mailing lists are one means of collecting such complaints and
making it known to (potential) developers. But I can imagine another level
of development process, i.e. hackathons (hosted by some Openmoko
association or foundation and sponsored by donations). But usually good
developers aren't that good in organizing such events. And vice versa.

It has also been suggested to me that Golden Delicious Comp. should take
such a role (like Openmoko. Inc. did have) - but I am hesitating.

I see the role of GDC to provide future open hardware but remain software
agnostic, i.e. completely open. And some of our community software is
hardware agnostic (well, to some degree). E.g. SHR runs on several
different platforms. This IMHO excludes such a leadership role.

> 
> What can we do to encourage those developers that we do have, and to entice
> some on-lookers who aren't developers yet but might be in the future?

Such an organization could give more visibility. It can give some "empowerment"
if someone becomes elected as project leader. Maybe even provide some financial
compensation (e.g. for travel expenses, free participation in Hackathons).

Finally, who is the person for press contacts? If someone wants to write
an article about Openmoko software - whom to contact first place?

But overall: we (and new users and developers) must feel that it is important
for mankind that we are member of this community (being formal or informal)
and contribute.

> 
> Maybe instead of asking "what would you like to see" (which certainly does
> have a place) we should be asking something more down to earth, immediate,
> and practical.
> 
> - what are you working on?
> - what have you recently achieved?
> - what one thing would you like help with?
> 
> For myself:
> I'm mostly working on aligning the kernel we use with the upstream kernel.
> I recently submitted a collection of patches upstream and am hoping
> some will stick.

++

> I've recently discovered that my approach to power-management for wifi
> and bluetooth is less than perfect.  Among other things it doesn't actually
> set the voltage properly, so we are running on 2.8V rather than 3.1V.  I
> think I know how to fix it though.

2.8V is a little low which reduces transmission power.
But on the GTA04A4 you can't set the voltage any more. It has a fixed 3.3V
LDO.

> I recently tried 3.4-rc4 on my GTA04 and it was less than a brilliant
> success. No sound cards appear and the X server keeps crashing. I would love
> it if someone else had a look ....  You can find the code in the
> 'gta04/mainline' branch of   git at github.com:neilbrown/linux.git
> 
> NeilBrown

Nikolaus