Reasons why people could be interested in this community

[joerg Reisenweber]

On Sat 24 August 2013 13:00:45 Bob Ham wrote:
> On Sat, 2013-08-24 at 09:56 +0200, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote:
> > > Why are you still a member of this community
> 
> I want freedom.  I want a phone that runs 100% free software, including
> any firmware for component devices and also including firmware running
> on the baseband processor.  I want the same freedom for the hardware.
> 
> The openmoko-community and openphoenux-community mailing lists are
> places where I expect like-minded people will congregate.
> 
> >> and participating in this discussion?
> 
> Even though I believe the GTA04 product from Golden Delicious is not
> viable, I don't expect it will be the last effort to produce a free
> phone.  Indeed, if Golden Delicious release the source files for the
> board, the GTA04 design could form a base for the development of the
> next effort.  I hope this will happen.

You say "gta04 is a fine basis to do further improvements but it's not worth 
getting the device itself".
That's insane. HNS and his small crew invested substantial time and *money* 
into actually *producing* a working device and all you need to do is buy one. 
This would allow golddelico to continue their awesome work.
But what you are interested in seems not at all focused on joining efforts but 
to "fork" and try on your own if you could do any better than Nikolaus.
I consider this rogue and silly. 
Plus you evidently have not the faintest idea of what's the real troubles in 
hw design and production, otherwise you'd not think you could do substantially 
better than goldelico. Every fool can draw up a nice (though most certainly 
not bug-free) schematics, and even creating a PCB layout is not that 
complicated, there are FOSS tools for that. The problems are somewhere else, 
and a project that considers PCB gerbers of GTA04 as an indispensable 
prerequisite for a new design, well such project is doomed to fail from 
beginning and I'd consider it detrimental to the actually existing and working 
GTA04 project since - even if not the manpower of those devels who focus on 
the new project due to lack of expertise and insight into where the major 
problems of any such project are - it however will deprive GTA04 project of 
possible customers that might contribute to GTA04 (and successors) with their 
money, if they weren't lured into waiting for another competing project 
started by a few guys who obviously think they can do better since they don't 
know sh*t about hw manufacturing.

my 2 ct about this weird arguing here.

A word to Nikolaus: I'm a bit sad that you ignore the fact that openmoko *did* 
share gerbers, PADS project files, BOM, whatever, on request. We shared 
everything, sometimes under a NDA when we had to do that way. And maybe you 
didn't know but Wolfgang pestered all EE pretty badly to allow community 
contribution, just we never really could come up with a workflow how to make 
such process work. The problem with that is the expertise of community 
contributions which take ten times the manpower of company EE staff to explain 
why it can't get done this way, than what company EE would need to come up 
with an own better draft for the same thing. 
OM been a company with "lots of money" so we didn't worry too much about 
community competing projects, and eventually I even convinced Sean and 
Wolfgang and others that no commercial competitor will snatch away and copy-
cat our product either.
Bottom line: to claim OM never allowed community contribution and never shared 
PCB or project files is pretty incorrect.

cheers
jOERG
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