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[Timo Jyrinki]

2012/5/23 Harald Welte <laforge at gnumonks.org>:
> Also, the fact when a particular event happens, and how it is publicized
> is always considere important in the corporate world.  Now if you like
> that or not, Openmoko Inc. was (and still is) a commercial entity.  And
> it's up to its management to decide when and to whom to publish
> something.

As a sidenote, I'd say that's something FLOSS communities should
actually learn from commercial entities. Transparency is one thing,
but preparing something well and getting it publicized in the right
way is essential for any sort of success, community or otherwise. Way
too often communities work in the way that kind of says "well there's
me and a couple of other guys/gals who know how the thing really goes,
others can always ask on IRC". Meanwhile, there is always the larger
public perception that matters to success and eg. attracting new
people that can be only affected by proper marketing and other PR.

This naturally is very much seen in Openmoko - the public perception
is very twisted and confused, and has always been since at least
Spring 2009 when Om Inc stopped with the handset business. Even before
that community vs. company picture wasn't clear and we all struggled
to understand what "Openmoko" actually is, and what the community
itself should take responsibility of or manage. The end result
together with various other problems like with the hardware was a
uniquely spread out and non-organized community. And so it is still
today, with the exception that everyone has needed to find "their
places" elsewhere but some still have stayed and understood the value
of this gathering of people.

To re-cap for historians again:
1) Openmoko Inc - the company - stopped phone business in May 2009
2) Openmoko - the Linux distribution - stopped likewise circa 2009.
Several community distributions supporting Openmoko hardware and other
phones still active and developed. SHR, Debian, QtMoko,
Android4FreeRunner.
3) Openmoko - the hardware - GTA02 'Neo FreeRunner' still available
from selected stores for tinkerers, non-Openmoko Inc "GTA04" upgrade
now available, before that there was work on-going on "gta02-core",
various hardware tools and knowledge on free hw creation have improved
4) Openmoko - the project and community - the 'Free The Phone' people
are still here and even more "there": in distributions, in
FreeSmartphone.Org/oFono, freeing up nonfree-by-default-phones
(Mer/Replicant/etc), helping GTA04 effort and other new hardware
projects. Wiki is still relevant and even updated in many parts, as
are mailing lists, while most other services like software development
have moved elsewhere like the single software projects or
distributions

One of the most important things that happened when Om Inc still was
in the phone business was the birth of the (idea of) Om2009
distribution and the freesmartphone.org middleware. At that point the
idea that "Openmoko software" would be needed kind of shifted away,
the software side of the problem called 'phone' externalized to its
own software project. Later on also oFono materialized as an
alternative for the subset of the same problem space.

-Timo