New Life in Openmoko Phones

[Nils Faerber]

Wolfgang Spraul schrieb:
> Today Openmoko released additional pieces of documentation about 
> Freerunner hardware: board outline, footprints and netlist.
> Same as all other releases before - under Creative Commons Share-Alike 
> license.
> Available at:
> http://downloads.openmoko.org/developer/schematics/GTA02/gta02_outline_footprints_netlist.tar.bz2

This is in general great!

But sorry to be a little sceptical here - but hardware != software. What
I mean is that collaboratively developing software is pretty easy since
we have the internet to share and most of us have a PC to develop upon.

But with hardware development the situation is a little bit different.
Even if the collaborate development effort succeeds, i.e. KiCAD is
sufficient and a hardware design becomes ready, it still needs to be
produced - and here troubles start, from buying the parts, making PCBs
etc. running up the whole stack to asembling the whole device and
testing it. This cannot be done as open source effort with volunteers.
Here real money is involved - a lot of real money. And this needs to be
done several times, for prototypes, small A-series, probably a B-series
and then final devices.
But you should know better than me about this process (at least by now).

What are the plans or ideas to enable later on production?
Pleas eget me right, I would love to see such a project succeed and
maybe even contribute to it but I really cannot imagine any possibility
how such a hardware production should work in the end without a big
sponsor in the background.

Cheers
  nils faerber

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