GTA04-N900 vel. Neo900

[Sebastian Krzyszkowiak]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 1:14 AM, joerg Reisenweber <joerg at openmoko.org> wrote:
> While rewriting blobs is a long term minor goal of CSSU [1], we won't do a
> complete rewrite of every closed blob for Neo900 fremantle-port. Actually if
> we did, we could use any arbitrary hardware ülatform and just recompile the
> completely liberated fremantle for it. We wouldn't need a GTA04-N900 that's
> close to the original N900 hw-wise. The idea of GTA04-N900 is to reduce the
> hw-diffs to an amount that can get handled in kernel/drivers by patching them.
> You probably know that kernel and kernel driver modules are FOSS in maemo.

Yeah, Neo900 won't be associated with any specific operating system.
SHR, QtMoko or anything else that works now on GTA04 should be very
easy, if not trivial, to run on Neo900. For this community, Neo900 is
just a upgraded GTA04 in different case (well, it might be that Neo900
will cause upgrade of GTA04 itself, so it will be rather something
like "variant of GTA04" rather than "upgrade" to it).

But there's one reason why we need "Fremantle Porting Task Force" -
demand. Maemo community waited for N900 successor for so long, and
with such low demand as we're struggling with those devices, every
single willing buyer helps us a lot. Also, this is not Nokia-owned OS
anymore - community owns it and effort to ditch closed blobs and
switch to free replacements is ongoing, as Joerg pointed out. There
are also some initiatives for rebasing Fremantle on top of current
Debian and to stay as close to upstream as possible.

Those efforts slowly die together with N900. When there are less and
less developers, the goal of "Freemantle" is more and more away.
Neo900 is meant to resurrect this community as soon as possible. While
joining "Freemantle" effort into Neo900 project would mean inevitable
failure (not enough manpower, people being disappointed due to
unstable software etc.), giving Maemo community something pretty much
rock-solid as a good base for future work (even with still with some
closed parts) might be better idea for our long term goals.

It might be that reimplementing some OS part will be easier than
adding some compatibility layer in kernel. In such cases, "Freemantle"
will even benefit directly from "porting task force" work.

And still, if you're not interested in Fremantle, just ignore it.
There are people who are - they will generate some demand, so we'll be
able to get bigger production runs, so everyone will be happier.
Nevertheless, Neo900 will stay true to everything that GTA04
represents right now. It will just get new form factor to attract
different people.

-- 
Sebastian Krzyszkowiak, dos
http://dosowisko.net/