On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Michael Richardson wrote: > > - Wifi Telephony, the open source way > > As far as we can tell, there haven't been any useable open source 802.11 > VoIP products that are still in production. > > Perhaps Paul would like to say more.
wifi-only phones have a very limited use. I have looked more at combination devices, GSM+wifi, running linux. The wifi-only market saw some new devices come to market, for example from Linksys, and saw some established ones die a painful death, for example Zultys (which technically is an opensource phone, since it runs Linux, but the source code is not available, and Zultys was conveniently sold to an entity that does not even have a website/domain). Another entry to pursue the backlog at http://gpl-violations.org/ For GSM phones running Linux, the conclusion is "It's bleeding edge, give it 6 months and there will be plenty of choice". With the best (upcoming) choice being a hacked up year old motorola using the www.openezx.org project or the Neo1973 from the http://wiki.openmoko.org project. The Parawireless hipi is worth mentioning. It is a hacked up proprietary linux OS, but it is a dual gsm+wifi phone. If someone wants to play with it, let me know, I have one. The GUI needs work but the tech is around and works. In fact, even when using the wifi/sip stack with a SIP provider as unlimitel, the quality is superior over alternatives that use Windows Mobile 5.0 with the Skype client. If you want to spend lots of money, the HTC phones are a good bet. They run Windows Mobile, but almost all of them can boot an alternative OS such as Linux by being tricked into running a "diagnostic" program straight from SDcard. this means you can play with Linux, without losing your Windows Mobile firmware. Look at the wiki.xda-developers.com website for more information. With the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, one wifi chip manufacturor has been tempted to release full docs to make a full opensource wifi low power chip. I expect to see these Marvel chips end up in Linux phones soon, or in variants on USB or SD(IO) cards that might be able to be plugged into a Linux GSM phone. They might need a separate power battery for that though, but those products do exist. The recent 3G telco conference in Barcelona showed many new products. One vendor that got my attention is www.e28.com. They have a bunch of linux based phones, now let's see how friendly they are with complying to the GPL and letting us hack them. See http://www.e28.com/e28mobile/mobile.htm The only two true opensource Linux phones however, are the GreenPhone and the Neo1973. You can order the GreenPhone now (I had less luck twice before and since lost interest in it). The GreenPhone uses the Trolltech commercial GUI called QTopia. It is still fairly cheap to buy a commercial license, and a GPL license for GPL applications is available too, but the phone itself is $600. The Neo1973 has not been released yet. Phones will go to developers this month, and in a few months endusers should be able to buy them. It uses only 100% completely free software. The GUI is based on OpenEmbedded.org. See http://www.trolltech.com/products/qtopia/greenphone and http://www.openmoko.com/ With commandline based free SIP stacks available, it's a matter of time before we can all get our opensource based dual GSM+wifi/SIP phones. But the time is not there yet.... The upcoming CeBIT might have more surprises for us. Paul
