A marketing angle

[Stefan Schmidt]

Hello.

On Tue, 2006-11-21 at 17:12, Ben F-W wrote:
> Stefan Schmidt wrote:
> > 
> >Nothing. It's exactly what FIC want.
> >
> Could you explain this? How would it benefit FIC for a rival 
> manufacturer to take a program developed for the OpenMoko platform and 
> adjust it to work on their own, closed, Linux implementation on their 
> phones?

Porting the applications to another platform is sometimes really
difficult. The most closed Linux implemtations I've seen so far on
smartphones were based on montavista, with a 2.4.x kernel, and Qtopia
on the top.

Porting the apps from OpenMoko over to Qtopia is a real pita. No new
kernel features, X instead of framebuffer, gtk instead of qt. Writing
it from scratch seems easier for me.

And you should not forget that the company has to do it alone. No
community jumps in and help.

> >Of course other comnpanies can handle this different to make it
> >harder for us, but they have to give us the modifications of the
> >GPL code. Ask the vendors which were in contact with
> >http://gpl-violations.org/
> >  
> Yes, they'd have to give us the modifications - but they wouldn't have 
> to use the OpenMoko platform, if I understand correctly. As I see it, 
> that wouldn't benefit FIC at all.

Yes, they only need to offer the modifications and stuff around to
build it. No need to use OpenMoko, but see above.

> >Another point you forgot here is that FIC have with OpenMoko a
> >platform for new devices with low engineering cost. Some new
> >hardware driver, a little bit GUI polish and that's it. No need to
> >complete redesign a phone every 6 months.
> Not sure I follow this. How does the OpenMoko give FIC any greater 
> advantages than other manufacturers get with their own Linux-based phones?

Really open your platform and you get lots of brilliant software
engineers for free. No need to pay yopur own devs for writing apps.
More apps makes it more interesting for users.

As you can see I don't know the business plan from FIC. I only think
that I share the point of view with Sean on most of the parts.

Þave a real open platform on linux smartphones was the reason I joined
OpenEZX. And I'm eager to see OpenMoko running on it as software
stack. :)

regards
Stefan Schmidt
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