Freerunner's Future

[Risto H. Kurppa]

Thanks Sean for this announcement!

It's appreciated to get a status update from OM of things we've heard
rumors of. I'm very happy that OM got this far with the phones: we
have some tens of thousands (better guess anyone?) of Linux phones
around the world, various open/free distros to run on the HW and means
to communicate to make it better. I think OM was decent on the
hardware side, it's a great achievement to have manufactured a
open/free Linux-phone. Thank you for that, thank you everyone who
worked on OM for this!

In the future, it'll be interesting to see where gta02-core takes us,
if there will be some other open hardware around to run the apps and
distros we've created for neo1973 and Freerunner. I hope that the rest
of the A7 freerunners will find to good hands, to good an enthusiastic
developers to boost the community to get the most out of our hardware.

On the software side, there has been some glitches and the community
has been lacking the direction. At the moment I myself trust on OM2009
(who knows if there will be a SHR2009 with SHR and OM2009 together)
and Paroli (Started by Openmoko and still being worked on by people
from Openmoko, now also a community is involved that's growing all the
time..). But I see that it's difficult for Openmoko to generate more
income by writing software so concentrating on hardware seems like a
smart choice, as long as there's a community to make the hardware
useful with the software they create.

Now as the community will go 'wild', I'd now, more than ever, like to
see good leadership practices to organize and guide the community. If
you ask me where OM failed, it's this: managing and leading the
community. So I think we'd need some direction where to make people
go, who don't know where to go. We have around 20 distros and phone
apps - I wouldn't like to see this all break in small sub-projects
that all do the same work and don't communicate, but one single big
project that'd actually take us somewhere.

I'd like to see some kind of democratic structure created to guide us
somewhere where most of us want to go.

http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/01/building-community-around-your-foss.html

Thank you Openmoko, I wish you all the best with project B. Hope you
generate enough money to roll out new open phones :)

r


-- 
| risto h. kurppa
| risto at kurppa dot fi
| http://risto.kurppa.fi