what is the difference between openMoko and windows mobile based phones

[Richard Franks]

On 1/18/07, hank williams <hank777 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I believe too many cooks spoil the stew, which is often a
> problem in open source, in my opinion. Its also often also a problem inside
> corporate development efforts. When there is no clear and absolute
> leadership, product design suffers. This is of course my opinion, based on
> my 30 years of software development. It is, nevertheless an opinion. Your
> mileage may vary.

I see this being true for monolithic projects such as a kernel, or an
office productivity suite.. I would say that it's debatable whether
the same holds true for the types of micro-application which are going
to be created using the OpenMoko API (which as a foundation does
appear to have clear leadership).

Monolithic product design I believe arose from distribution and OS
layer limitations - when you simply couldn't download weekly updates
or patches, the product had to get it right the first time. It didn't
always happen that way of course, but there was no real alternative as
the network infrastructure hadn't been built up yet.

Communication accelerates standardisation, and standardisation paves
the way for smaller tighter applications. Given the diversity of
interests shown on this list, I don't think we'll run into the
too-many-cooks issue any time soon.

Out of interest, which Open Source projects have fallen victim to the
too-many-cooks problem?

Richard