Sean Moss-pultz Talks About Openmoko


b._.o._.b

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Very interesting talk from the Openmoko CEO Sean Moss-Pultz. His honest remark that he is still using a blackberry because his Freerunner is not reliable enough to use as a daily phone, is a great example of an open company being open.

CODE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFuwhPXYxxI


I see a lot of similarities between the OpenMoko/Freerunner project and Pandora. Both open devices, both building something new from scratch, both having/had huge problems with delays. Openmoko needs to cut in costs because of less sales. They have laid off some people and continue as a smaller company trying to launch a new product called -project B-.
Ive sold my Freerunner, but Im still hoping they will make it and I hope -project B- will be something I will be interested in.


Hopefully Pandora will be more successful in bringing a great consumer product from day one. To be hones though, the issues surrounding the countless Pandora delays has made me a bit more sceptical.

Steve Mosher, Marketing VP for Openmoko, discusses the company s revised focus and the path forward for 2009.

CODE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d8Tsvj2TdQ
 
'craigix' said:
What's their secret project? A netbook using ARM maybe?
Not sure... what he is holding in the video looks like a small tablet pc. Maybe it is partly made of parts they already have on hand for Freerunners. I guess they want to create some buzz before revealing what it will become.

They want to launch it this year in August.
 
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GTA03 is supposed to be an Internet tablet using ARM and delivering low-power browsing capabilities - with optional cell phone (3G/etc.) capabilities.

IMHO, OpenMoko has been screwed from the beginning (looking at my dusty gta01 and gta02 right now, in fact) because of ridiculous management by none-other than Sean Moss-Pultz himself. If there were actually a Linux distribution manager who really did manage the project and not let all the ego's go wandering around the universe (grrr, raster, grrr hwelte, grrr...) dictacting ridiculous NIH-based dogma that ruined the scene, things would be different. How many different Linux distro's can you run on a GTA03 (freerunner) right now? About 12. How many actually work as a phone: about 2, almost. And for the ones that you can use as a phone, almost nobody in the FR community has them, so for 3rd-party development its an utter nightmare to try to consider your customers. There are no customers for 3rd-party development on Freerunner - there are only customers for brand new, from-scratch complete Linux distributions. The only developers making any kind of headway with the Freerunner platform are *selling Freerunners directly as part of their package*. You simply cannot, reliably and without massive expense, target the Freerunner platform right now as a developer, and expect your users to keep up with whats going on.

It is very, very important for Linux-based devices to have a benevolent dictatorship behind the scenes that governs the public releases of the distribution, and this distribution has to be *standardized* in such a way that anyone can use it - not just those brave enough to flash u-boot ..

Please guys, let us TRY hard not to suffer the same FORK-happy spluge-fest that OpenMoko went through .. we developers have to insist that there be an 'official' base platform distribution shipped on all Pandora's that can be reliably targetted as a platform for 3rd-party development. Sure, we could also do 'download this SD image and boot from it' at which point *all* interoperability falls out the window, but we stand to lose a lot of the assets that a clean, well-maintained Linux distro brings to the table if we ignore the fact that we do, in fact, have to build this Linux distro as a community. We sure don't need so many forks!
 
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QUOTE

IMHO, OpenMoko has been screwed from the beginning (looking at my dusty gta01 and gta02 right now, in fact) because of ridiculous management by none-other than Sean Moss-Pultz himself.


I agree that things probably could have been managed better. The focus should have been to create a working phone first with the whole team working on this topic.
At his defence: his management style didn't create enemies. You can see ex-employees still developing in their spare time. I think that is a good thing.
Also he is the first person to try a huge undertaking like this, that on its own is worth something imo.

Eventhough there has been made a lot of mistakes I'm still positive about the project (just like Pandora). I hope every owner will eventually benefit from the open character of the phone with the capabilities of any other phone.
 
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'craigix' said:
What's their secret project? A netbook using ARM maybe?
What he got out of his pocket during the presentation looked very much like one of those portable navigation devices. We know it's not a phone as that is what GTA03 was supposed to be. Probably the feature seeing most use in the Freerunner is the GPS so I think it's realistic to assume that they are going to try to make a cheap open source GPS handheld which can then be used to work on Open Streetmap, bycicle computer software etc. That's what I would do, at least.
 
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