Ubuntu / Firefox OS for Openmoko

Sebastian Krzyszkowiak dos at dosowisko.net
Fri Jan 11 21:23:18 CET 2013


On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 7:51 PM, Peter Viskup <skupko.sk at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 01/11/2013 05:04 PM, Sebastian Krzyszkowiak wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 4:49 PM, Thamos<tigerred at gmx.de>  wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> i am ambiguous about that.
>>> I think we have already enough Operating Systems with QtMoko and SHR and
>>> Replicant. (Did i miss a really working distro?)
>>> But, as it seems to me, we don't have enough software developers, and as
>>> Mozilla and Ubuntu are big projects, this seems to be a way to use their
>>> ressources to get some nice features to our phones.
>>>
>>> i don't know anything about the OSs themself to evaluate them.
>>> And i don't know if they are really interested in working with us, as
>>> you wrote, they are searching big players....
>>>
>>> I think the question is if we have people on our side who want to start
>>> such an project (and try to drag some of their developers in).
>>>
>>> greets,
>>> Thamos
>>
>> Personally, I think that all we need is some good marketing inside the
>> community. For many people that do not track Openmoko by themselves,
>> this project is dead. When I mention it to someone, reaction is very
>> often "is it still alive? Really?".
>
> Agree with you and the main reason is that on openmoko sites there is plenty
> not updated information, qtmoko doesn't have webpage promoting it.
> All this confused me a lot when I join you some months before. I think that
> there is no project management on this front and this community is somehow
> self driven without any vision or plans for the future.
>
>
>> Ubuntu and Firefox OS may be good opportunities to use for marketing.
>> A lot of people inside those two communities will be interested in a
>> phone that is completely free and allows them to run systems they're
>> working on without fighting with some closed source binaries. This
>> will also attract FLOSS-extremists (sorry for term, just couldn't find
>> out anything better at the moment :D) to those OSes, so benefits will
>> be mutual.
>
> Looks like the Ubuntu or Firefox OS are/will be not interesting for GTA02
> users as the new OSes are not optimized for HW with such low memory. But of
> course it could help promote OpenMoko.
>
> --
> Peter

I don't think GTA02 will be good hw platform for those systems, but
GTA04 should work well.

On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 8:40 PM, Al Johnson
<openmoko at mazikeen.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> On Friday 11 January 2013 19:00:37 Radek Polak wrote:
>> On Friday, January 11, 2013 05:04:28 PM Sebastian Krzyszkowiak wrote:
>> > Ubuntu and Firefox OS may be good opportunities to use for marketing.
>>
>> Yup, i think if we were the first HW that runs Firefox OS and Ubuntu this
>> could make our phone mentioned in some bigger magazines and make some noise.
>
> That boat's already sailed I'm afraid. Firefox OS already runs on Galaxy SII,
> Galaxy Nexus, Nexus S and Nexus S 4G, plus pandaboard and a few others. Ubuntu
> are supposed to be releasing an image for the Galaxy Nexus soon.

It could still be the first open hardware platform to run those
systems with working telephony support without binary blobs. This
would be big thing, at least for some part of the community.

Original Openmoko project got its popularity thanks to promise of
fully open and free hardware platform. It failed, cause things with
quality of early development stages were advertised as ready products.
Personally I expected development platform with some GSM support,
nothing more - and today I'm still using my GTA02. Unfortunately, lots
of people wanted to have stable, mature solution with added value of
freedom and openness. All they got was freedom and openness, which
apparently wasn't enough for them.

Ubuntu and Firefox OS are for sure more popular projects than SHR or
QtMoko. Personally all my heart goes to latter ones, but that doesn't
change the fact, that they cannot compete with first ones regarding
community size and support. But I think that some people, attracted
with free platform that runs popular OS, will also look at and maybe
contribute to our purely community driven projects. There is also one
more thing, which I think more people will do - contributing to GTA04
project itself. Free platform with well-supported OS will attract not
only software hackers (who will spread over all different operating
systems), but also hardware ones :) Some of them caught on GTA02 too,
but I think many of them wanted to give it a chance but resigned due
to software state. This is where I find the biggest opportunity for us
at the moment.

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



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