Weekly Engineering News 39 & 40/2008

[Marek Lindner]

Hello everybody,

Wolfgang is back in town but fighting desperate battles to bring us better 
hardware. So, I try to give you the latest news about the current state of 
Openmokos engineering. I hope he and you like it.  :-)

Mickey, Jan and Daniel (all part the FSO team) came to Taipeh in order to 
discuss the next steps of the Openmoko distribution, FSO APIs, FSO 
integration and a presentation about the current state of the FSO reference 
implementation. As a result of the talks the following was decided:

- Openmoko is going to fund freesmartphone.org and treat it as a complement to 
freedesktop.org. FSO defines an API which makes it easier to develop 
applications on top of it and provides a reference implementation.

- Openmoko understands that an open API which is available for as many 
platforms as possible is extremely valuable for the community and Openmoko 
itself. We can have competition on top of that API or underneath but we share 
that very API which makes all sorts of application interoperable.

- One of the major features in the next Openmoko software release (Om2009) 
will be "FSO-compliant". Meaning that software that builds upon the FSO APIs 
will be able to run on the next major release.

- As freesmartphone.org is not for Openmoko only but also for all other mobile 
devices feel invited to join the development on freesmartphone.org.

- The Openmoko distribution will move closer to Openembedded upstream. Our 
engineers were merging the Openmoko branches with the OE branches. That 
process is not totally complete yet but thats the main direction we are 
heading towards. Our distro team will publish detailed information soon.


Until now Openmoko was focussing on building their own packages and offered a 
community upload portal. The shortcomings of this approach in mind we 
reorganized the packages build structure. Openmoko will provide the an 
autobuilder which tries to build as many packages as possible and sync them 
with our download servers. Once your package is available in OE and is 
buildable everyone can easily install it. this approach should relief 
individual software developers of maintaining their own images and help them 
distributing the software. The autobuilder is work in progress - we keep you 
posted.


As you may have noticed we hired some more kernel developers in order to 
stabilize the Openmoko platform and push our drivers into the mainline source 
tree. We have to get them into shape to get them accepted. Openmoko's goal is 
to enable everybody to download the vanilla kernel, compile it and boot the 
device. We know it's a long way to go.  :-)


Marek