Not supporitng GTA01? [Was: [openmoko-announce] Om 2008.12 & Beyond]

Marc Bantle openmoko at rcie.de
Wed Dec 24 01:07:10 CET 2008


Peter Rasmussen schrieb:
> My Neo1973 was from one of the first, if not the first batch sent out to 
> regular people and nobody was more excited about OpenMoko than I. Sean 
> probably doesn't remember it, but if he has saved his mails, he'll have 
> the mail trail.
>
> 1.The Neo1973, the GTA01, was promoted as the final developer's version 
> of a platform that would be the open source version of iPhone. When it 
> shipped, it couldn't even boot the image it was shipped with!?!
> 2.The follow up to the Neo1973, then just known as the GTA02 was 
> supposed to be a general available phone for the masses, in September 2006.
> 3.Let me repeat that: The GTA02 was supposed to be a general available 
> phone for the masses, in September 2006!
True! I second your impression, that this twist was not
communicated in a upright manner.
> 6.The OpenMoko camp failed miserably in many ways, of which the most 
> obvious, as is unfortunately the usual scene, the management failed to 
> understand their task.
> 7.If the GTA0? was to be a developer's platform, then why wasn't it 
> developed as such?
>    7.A A developer's platform will contain elements as 'focus on making 
> it easy to produce an environment to develop the kernel and platform 
> software'
>    7.B A developer's platform will produce easy communication between 
> *all* developers and not just the primadonnas that are good enough to 
> make *something work, *but apparently not to talk with the lesser able 
> in order to make a whole team work for the whole.
>   
This is not fair. The number of developers of OM
is marginal compared to those at proprietary vendors.
> So, if the OpenMoko team at FIC is serious about supporting the 
> community, please communicate it much more clearly, and don't think you 
> have the backing the size of the Linux kernel!
>
> You see, apparently you haven't been able to after now several years, 
> create an image on the Neo 1973 that will not run out of juice even when 
> apparently shut off, after 12 hours. 
>   
True, but GTA01 was never advertised as anything else
but a developers platform, even in Openmoko wording.
> Then, you are apparently trying to develop this device to the whole 
> world, but aren't able to, after more than a year able to produce 
> support for anything else than the US ASCII character set when writing 
> SMS. And FIC being in a Chinese country that actually needs double byte 
> character sets, I am amazed that it wasn't in the first image!
>   
I think I understand where you getting at. Currently the focus
has to be reliability. But I believe those things will be a topic,
as soon as there's is a basic "default" PIM suite for Openmoko,
the concept of which has been changing so many times and
will hopefully have a happy end in paroli.

And, it is important for Openmoko to have that "default"
PIM suite to be a fully functional basic phone stack. So
many potential future killer applications need to base
on a solid PIM software concept with all that goes
along with it: Storage. Search, Synchronization.
> So, the whole situation reeks of a top management problem to recognize 
> the issues of making a platform that has the basic problems at issue, 
> instead of letting everyone on the FIC/OpenMoko payroll know that 
> producing a working platform for everyone else is important.
>
> Sean Moss-Pultz hasn't done his job.
>   
That again is not fair. There have been decisions not quite transparent
to the community and there have been communication flaws.
But I am happy about the core decisions, because they preserve the
open nature of the OM stack not forcing anybody into anything.
There's X, there's Linux, there's GTK, there's EFL ... .
> My Neo1973 looks more an more like a door stop, and my friends with 
> iPhones, HTC Touch and such understands my original excitement less and 
> less!
>   
Fortunately I was aware of that option in the moment I bought my GTA01
(Mid 2007). Possibly it will give a decent touch screen gui for my heating
control or something similar (When I find the time ;-)

-Marc



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