Re: Openmoko's downfall (was changing IMEI)
On Fri 21 February 2014 08:26:59 Radek Polak wrote: On Thursday, February 20, 2014 08:38:35 PM Michael Spacefalcon wrote: I am also convinced that the *real* reason why Openmoko = failure in the general public's perception is precisely because of that NDA and no one having broken it during the years when it mattered the most. That's your point of view. Point of view of a firmware hacker. But there are other points of view. E.g. some people expect the phone ring when friends/wife/customer calls. I had many phones before and 2 phones after (N900 and now Jolla). None of them had any problems with SMS and telephony. Openmoko is different - they never provided SW for reliable phone. Openmoko never provided stable maintainable kernel - instead they wasted their time on doing 4 ugly unusable distros while at the time they had perfectly stable usable and working Qtopia. Granted, but then QTopia never been a true linux in my book. IIRC it had no X11, thus according to my definition of my dream companion it's as useless as Sailfish is now, and android ever been. And do you suggest any of your other phones provided a maintainable kernel so far? I have some of them too and know a bit about their kernels, I don't think they are any better than what OM provided. A question to Michael S.: the heck which dang NDA are you talking about? OM allowed all reasonable individuals access to all the docs and specs and schematics we ever had, on request (yes, including the calypso sources we had - which not been much and not been maintained by OM at all, basically). We were just not able to put it on fileservers or P2P since that would have taken us out of business immediately. That's business, sorry you don't like to accept reality in that regard, probably caused by your communist ideology. But then, why don't you start a company in Russia? OOPS, they also went capitalism now. Maybe China, with their copycat capitalism, is the best homebase for you? Anyway OM never promised to help you bring communism to world dominion, neither at large nor in hw manufacturing. OM just started to bring you best you can get regarding openness and freedom. No use in stating man should be able to fly and do a basejump from Eiffel tower dressed in a funny suit to make that happen. When OM would've taken that approach, absolutely zilch of all that's been achieved ever had reached the community. And even 5 years after there is no good kernel for Freerunner. 2.6.29-rc seems quite stable but the patch against mainline is horrible, besides it's power management is worse then it could be. 2.6.39 has hardly nearly unreproducible problem with resume. Well, you can't deny the fact that *not* a *single* phone has a clean mainline kernel. That's because mainline - sorry to be frank here - has NFC about power saving. Neither about handling realtime requirements in resource limited embedded environment (admittedly not kernel's fault) Now we have free firmware which is cool, but the usablity of the phone hasnt changed much. Well, my take on that is: it's up to you, the community, to come up with such systems designed to provide improved usability. Look, even Nokia announced EOL for any maemo fremantle maintenance only 2 years after roll out of N900. You'd have to pay a yearly fee probably even higher than the initial purchase price of the device, to make any group of professional paid developers continue support of a finalized product longer than a year or two, since otherwise there's simply no budget for such effort. Freerunner been *free* in that it absolutely allows community to pick up on that task, you got *all* the *needed* *info* and docs, and that's what OM ever been about. *NOT* about liberating the *GSM* radio stack. It has been mentioned in one of the last 5 posts to this thread: indeed, depending on your definition of free, you possibly never will find a ONE HUNDRED PERCENT FREE phone since no chip manuf will give you the masks and process step specs, nor the detailed internal structure description of chips, not even for ARM CPU. And the perceived liberation of FreeRunner now with that pirated GSM stack is a delusion as well, there are still things like WLAN firmware and glamo drivers, not to mention the maybe disclosed but not at all understood source code in the undocumented calypso chipset GSM stack itself. Heck I bet there's a whole lot of kernel stuff that's been provided by some chip manuf in BSP for the CPU/SoC and never reached the level of understood by community so it could get done again for next similar chip. When you (whoever) call that rather unexciting and irrelevant achievement of pirated GSM radio stack the frontier line between a free and a proprietary embedded device that allegedly been crossed now, then I dunno what's your benchmarks and philosophy at large. cheers jOERG -- () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\
Re: Openmoko's downfall (was changing IMEI)
On Friday, February 21, 2014 09:15:27 AM joerg Reisenweber wrote: Openmoko is different - they never provided SW for reliable phone. Openmoko never provided stable maintainable kernel - instead they wasted their time on doing 4 ugly unusable distros while at the time they had perfectly stable usable and working Qtopia. Granted, but then QTopia never been a true linux in my book. IIRC it had no X11, thus according to my definition of my dream companion Running X11 apps with QTopia is technically possible. QtMoko supports this, although it could be much better integrated - but only because it was not a big priority for me. it's as useless as Sailfish is now, and android ever been. Well, IMO you should always start with something simple and working. I'd been happy if Freerunner was running from day 0 simple, reliable, power management friendly distro with Accept call and Read SMS. Community does the rest. And do you suggest any of your other phones provided a maintainable kernel so far? I have some of them too and know a bit about their kernels, I don't think they are any better than what OM provided. Right, 2.6.29-rc is probably good one - i cant recall if it's 100% perfect, but it could be. It was probably mistake to abandon it, since 2.6.3x have the suspend problems. I recently patched it to work with recent debian and made QtMoko branch which works with it, but i never decided to completely revert to it, because: 1/ it eats battery more then 2.6.39 2/ there was so much energy put in making 2.6.39 working 3/ nearly impossible to apply any security patches Regards Radek ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Openmoko's downfall (was changing IMEI)
Radek Polak pson...@seznam.cz wrote: But there are other points of view. E.g. some people expect the phone ring when friends/wife/customer calls. Yes, that's exactly what I seek out of my cellphone too. And that is why I require having the source for all sw/fw involved in this telephony function, so when it breaks, I can debug and fix it myself, long after the original manuf has gone bye-bye. I had many phones before and 2 phones after (N900 and now Jolla). None of them had any problems with SMS and telephony. My experience is different. Until about a year ago, my true trusted phone was Mot V66 (a flip phone which I first got in 2003 if my memory serves me right). It mostly worked, but every now and then I would notice the coverage status LED flashing red instead of green - I would then open the flip to see what's going on, and the display would read Unregistered SIM. The only way to get it out of that wedged state was to cycle the power; doing the latter would immediately show perfectly good coverage with high signal strength - so it is obviously a case of the fw getting stuck in some wedged state, rather than the GSM network, although I reason that the triggering cause is likely some network transient event. This is on T-Mobile USA, Southern California, 1900 MHz GSM band. About a year ago I switched from this Mot V66 to the Calypso-based Pirelli as my everyday personal phone. Still running Pirelli's original proprietary fw for now - getting FreeCalypso into a state where it can drive a complete dumbphone rather than a mere modem is a big project still in its infancy. But it is still a freedom increment over the Mot V66, as now I have a full understanding of the GSM chipset I am using (the one in the V66 is something unknown to me), and because the original proprietary fw is TI-based, there are plenty of things I can poke at with my FC tools. And guess what, Pirelli's proprietary fw exhibits the same strange behavior with the phone inexplicably going out of service until rebooted - but instead of Unregistered SIM, the LCD simply reads GSM no service, just as if I went into a Faraday cage - except that the GSM signal is perfectly fine, as the phone itself indicates when I reboot it. So it is the same case of the fw stuck in some wedged state. I don't know if the GTA02 modem running moko11 or leo2moko suffers from the same bug or not - it manifests rarely enough that one needs to be using the phone on an everyday basis to catch it. Openmoko is different - they never provided SW for reliable phone. [...] And even 5 years after there is no good kernel for Freerunner. And why has no one in the community produced such a good kernel in all these 5 years? One probable reason is because the brightest and most talented kernel hackers, those most qualified to produce such a kernel, have left this community in frustration (moved on to other life interests and pursuits) when no liberated/NDA-broken GSM fw appeared. 2013-10-13 04:08:54 CEST came a little too late, I'm afraid - by that point all those best and brightest have already departed this community for good, doing something else for fun in their lives. 2.6.29-rc seems quite stable but the patch against mainline is horrible, besides it's power management is worse then it could be. 2.6.39 has hardly nearly unreproducible problem with resume. Now we have free firmware which is cool, but the usablity of the phone hasnt changed much. Hearing stories like this (both now and during the 2y I spent looking for the TI fw deliverables) helped convince me that I would be better off spending my time building a free dumbphone with no Linux at all, rather than whipping GTA02 Linux AP software into shape so it could function as a poor man's imitation of a dumbphone. Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller h...@goldelico.com wrote: I invite every = remaining Openmoko GTA01/02 owner to cannibalize their device for a = GTA04A5 motherboard. There is a special place in Hell reserved for murderers of good free hardware like you. joerg Reisenweber jo...@openmoko.org wrote: A question to Michael S.: the heck which dang NDA are you talking about? Whichever NDA it was/is that is cited by a bunch of Om wiki pages as the reason for GSM modem fw not being free like the rest of the device. OM allowed all reasonable individuals access to all the docs and specs and schematics we ever had, on request Many were probably too timid to ask, or saw no point in getting such privileged access, reasoning what good would it do for me to have access to that shit under NDA if I can't freely share it with the world and hire any programmer of my choice to troubleshoot odd issues which I lack the skills to figure out myself... In any case, it's a solved problem now; the total collection of docs plus 4 different source versions in my GSM mini-Wikileaks is probably greater than what you ever had, so no more demands or threats from me. :) But it's hard to refrain from
Re: Openmoko's downfall (was changing IMEI)
On Fri, 21 Feb 2014 10:10:23 +0100 Radek Polak pson...@seznam.cz wrote: Well, IMO you should always start with something simple and working. I'd been happy if Freerunner was running from day 0 simple, reliable, power management friendly distro with Accept call and Read SMS. Community does the rest. thanks for the work you've done on this, Radek. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Openmoko's downfall (was changing IMEI)
On Fri 21 February 2014 10:36:59 Michael Spacefalcon wrote: VLR, SF Do yourself a favor and ask some of your friends with a more down-to-earth mindset before you ever again consider posting such mails. When you don't get it, go and ask your friends, maybe they also can explain to you why I suggested this. Good luck! /j -- () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments (alas the above page got scrapped due to resignation(!!), so here some supplementary links:) http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil.shtml http://www.nonhtmlmail.org/campaign.html http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil_still.shtml http://www.gerstbach.at/2004/ascii/ (German) signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Openmoko's downfall (was changing IMEI)
Please don't polemize! ROTFL - are you asking me not to bring disagreement here? Incidentally - you're input on the IMEI topic (and much else), is not unappreciated (by me), but freeing the GSM firmware is *cool* Best wishes -- David Matthews m...@dmatthews.org ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Openmoko's downfall (was changing IMEI)
Am 21.02.2014 um 10:36 schrieb Michael Spacefalcon: I invite every = remaining Openmoko GTA01/02 owner to cannibalize their device for a = GTA04A5 motherboard. There is a special place in Hell reserved for murderers of good free hardware like you. ROFL - you are believing in Hell and you are talking about ethical categories... ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Openmoko's downfall (was changing IMEI)
On Thu 20 February 2014 20:38:35 Michael Spacefalcon wrote: was a proprietary phone no different from anything out of Motorola, Samsung or Apple. evidently bullshit! -- () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments (alas the above page got scrapped due to resignation(!!), so here some supplementary links:) http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil.shtml http://www.nonhtmlmail.org/campaign.html http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil_still.shtml http://www.gerstbach.at/2004/ascii/ (German) signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Openmoko's downfall (was changing IMEI)
Of course it will never happen legally, but so what? We can build it illegally instead. You are a Pied Piper of Hamelin. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Openmoko's downfall (was changing IMEI)
On Fri 21 February 2014 07:29:28 Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote: Of course it will never happen legally, but so what? We can build it illegally instead. You are a Pied Piper of Hamelin. Let's hope we don't have to read Pied Piper Revisited or learn about some landslide or somesuch, in a few years. ;-P /j -- () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments (alas the above page got scrapped due to resignation(!!), so here some supplementary links:) http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil.shtml http://www.nonhtmlmail.org/campaign.html http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil_still.shtml http://www.gerstbach.at/2004/ascii/ (German) signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Openmoko's downfall (was changing IMEI)
On Fri 21 February 2014 07:48:02 joerg Reisenweber wrote: On Fri 21 February 2014 07:29:28 Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote: Of course it will never happen legally, but so what? We can build it illegally instead. You are a Pied Piper of Hamelin. Let's hope we don't have to read Pied Piper Revisited or learn about some landslide or somesuch, in a few years. ;-P /j And particularly: who's Rumpelstiltskin? And is OM == Shrek? -- () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments (alas the above page got scrapped due to resignation(!!), so here some supplementary links:) http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil.shtml http://www.nonhtmlmail.org/campaign.html http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil_still.shtml http://www.gerstbach.at/2004/ascii/ (German) signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Openmoko's downfall (was changing IMEI)
Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller h...@goldelico.com wrote: You are a Pied Piper of Hamelin. I don't mind the role. Check out The Stolen Child, poem/song by William Butler Yeats - I particularly like this rendition: http://www.elvendrums.com/cddragon.php VLR, SF ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Openmoko's downfall (was changing IMEI)
On Thursday, February 20, 2014 08:38:35 PM Michael Spacefalcon wrote: I am also convinced that the *real* reason why Openmoko = failure in the general public's perception is precisely because of that NDA and no one having broken it during the years when it mattered the most. That's your point of view. Point of view of a firmware hacker. But there are other points of view. E.g. some people expect the phone ring when friends/wife/customer calls. I had many phones before and 2 phones after (N900 and now Jolla). None of them had any problems with SMS and telephony. Openmoko is different - they never provided SW for reliable phone. Openmoko never provided stable maintainable kernel - instead they wasted their time on doing 4 ugly unusable distros while at the time they had perfectly stable usable and working Qtopia. And even 5 years after there is no good kernel for Freerunner. 2.6.29-rc seems quite stable but the patch against mainline is horrible, besides it's power management is worse then it could be. 2.6.39 has hardly nearly unreproducible problem with resume. Now we have free firmware which is cool, but the usablity of the phone hasnt changed much. Regards Radek ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Openmoko's downfall (was changing IMEI)
Am 21.02.2014 um 08:26 schrieb Radek Polak: On Thursday, February 20, 2014 08:38:35 PM Michael Spacefalcon wrote: I am also convinced that the *real* reason why Openmoko = failure in the general public's perception is precisely because of that NDA and no one having broken it during the years when it mattered the most. That's your point of view. Point of view of a firmware hacker. and someone who wants to modify history to fit his argumentation. But there are other points of view. E.g. some people expect the phone ring when friends/wife/customer calls. I had many phones before and 2 phones after (N900 and now Jolla). None of them had any problems with SMS and telephony. Yes. This is one important factor. The other one was simply the economic hiccup end of 2008 why OM had to cancel the already developed GTA03 for simple economic reasons. Openmoko is different - they never provided SW for reliable phone. Openmoko never provided stable maintainable kernel This is completely different with the GTA04 and why I invite every remaining Openmoko GTA01/02 owner to cannibalize their device for a GTA04A5 motherboard. Because that goal is within reach with the GTA04. We have not reached the goal to get the 100% complete and optimal kernel from kernel.org or debian.org, but are working on a 3.14 kernel and getting things mainline (already with some success). And Replicant 4.2 is starting to work as well. BTW: more support for that work from the community would speed up progress. - instead they wasted their time on doing 4 ugly unusable distros while at the time they had perfectly stable usable and working Qtopia. And even 5 years after there is no good kernel for Freerunner. 2.6.29-rc seems quite stable but the patch against mainline is horrible, besides it's power management is worse then it could be. 2.6.39 has hardly nearly unreproducible problem with resume. Now we have free firmware which is cool, but the usablity of the phone hasnt changed much. Except for QtMoko which IMHO also should get more support to optimize the last 2%. BR, Nikolaus ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
