Weekly Engineering News 41/2008

[Wolfgang Spraul]

Hi everybody,
back to the basics!

That's the main news from Taipei last week. We decided to focus our  
engineering on just the basics, even less eye candy: Robust kernel,  
fast boot time, basic telephony with great audio quality, powerful  
configuration from the command line, hardware quality. That's it.
We will stop working on our Installer, Locations, Diversity and  
Settings applications. We will get back to all this when the rest is  
rock solid, but now is not the time. Feel free to pickup any of these  
projects in the meantime, it's a great way to get affiliated with  
Openmoko as we will surely get back to them later - hardware features  
of GTA03 remain as currently planned.
To support the new strategy, we have made some organizational changes.  
The way we are funding freesmartphone.org and Mickey's framework team  
has been changed (http://www.vanille-media.de/site/index.php/2008/10/14/ci61-0650-fra/ 
), John Lee will form a group of Taiwanese software engineers whose  
focus will be on optimizing various parts of the software stack. We  
are working on a new way to empower Andy and have him build and lead a  
kernel team.

Some lighter news from the office: Sean found an article about Pixar's  
"Collective Creativity" and we are now creatively interpreting the  
article for our Taipei office life :-)
See the article: http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?articleID=R0809D&ml_action=get-article&print=true
Somewhere it mentions "inadvertent encounters", so we randomly  
shuffled everyone's seats! A lot of fun! There are indeed lots of new  
inadvertent encounters in the office now, as everybody is scrambling  
to find their colleagues...

The head of our testing team, Regina Kim, moved to Australia and will  
continue to work from there.
We hired a new IT person, Ray Chao, to work full-time in Taipei. He  
will co-work with roh + gismo in Berlin. One of his first big tasks  
will be to take over responsibility to keep our automated daily builds  
running.
We hired Christopher Hall, a very experienced engineer who will start  
in production testing software and may later help us a lot on bigger  
tasks.

More next week, everybody here stays focused on GTA02 bug fixing and  
GTA03 development...
Best Regards,
Wolfgang & Marek