Thanks to everyone who responded! It was reassuring for me to hear that my engineering common sense thinking that a device like GTA02 ought to be less efficient than a true dumbphone was indeed on the right track. It's just that previously I have heard so many praises for FR running QtMoko (or even SHR) that I was starting to doubt if there was any merit at all to my Free Dumb Phone idea.
I do notice one common thread though: there seems to be a not insignificant number of people in our community (and in the larger Om community from which we spawned) who use the GTA02 because it is literally their first and only phone. Furthermore, it seems that these people have never experienced any non-smart phone before, hence they have nothing to compare against. To those of you who use or have used a GTA02 as your first and only phone: let me guess, you were lured in by Openmoko's pompous advertising of it as a totally free phone, and then very disappointed when Openmoko failed to live up to the promise when it comes to the GSM part, right? With leo2moko fw the GSM part is now free in both moral (what we have is no worse than what "they" had) and practical (we can see and understand everything it does) senses, and even the binary lib components of this TCS211 fw are no major obstacle as the corresponding components are in full source form in the other version (TCS3.2), and our gcc-built fw is getting close to proving that these full-src versions from TCS3.2 are a workable substitute for the binary-only TCS211 ones. But now that we have confirmation that the FR is flawed in not one but two ways (not just the no-longer-available status, but apparently it never was the epitome of perfection it is sometimes made out to be), we have justification to continue with the plan of building a totally free phone that will be plain, rather than smart. Another factor to consider is that building a totally free and practically usable dumbphone is very much within the capabilities of our small team (practically me, DS and another friend of mine who is not on this list who does PCB layout for OSHW projects): the hardware of a Calypso dumbphone is simple enough that I should be able to produce a decent design despite being nowhere near a professional hw engineer, we have a good working reference source for all necessary parts of the fw, and we understand everything well enough to where we'll be fully able to support the product and ensure that it really works no worse than a standard off-the-shelf dumbphone. We don't have the same confidence base when it comes to free smartphone designs like GTA0x. From my observations on the Openmoko list, it seems that both GTA02 and GTA04 users (and sw developers like Radek) have oftentimes come to issues which they couldn't solve, and they would just throw their hands in the air - "I/we don't know how to solve this" - and go on using their devices crippled as they are, with the user just having to live with and work around some non-understood problem. I personally don't see this situation being much better than the closed proprietary stuff, from a purely practical standpoint: in both cases there are some annoying issues which you can't fix and which you have to just live with and work around the best you can. Thus even though the number of people who would enjoy having a free smartphone is probably much larger than the number of people who would enjoy a free dumb phone, a free dumb phone of 100% stellar quality, reliability and usability is actually within reach for us, whereas if we went with the free smart phone route, it is highly doubtful that we would be able to produce anything much better than the current GTA0x, which I hear is still not quite up to par after all. So it looks like my Free Dumb Phone idea is still on the right track. :) Now let me address a couple of specific points: David wrote: > Incidentally I was hoping that the Motorola and the Pirelli would have a > freecalypso option someday, but since I do not have the skills to contribute > I respect a decision to not go there. It may still happen, it's just that there are a couple of factors adding delay and uncertainty: * Right now we need to get the basic core of our fw working no worse than TCS211, and it makes no sense to start looking into those "difficult" targets until we get this basic part done. * Once we are done with all of the foundation stuff and are ready to approach the end goal of a usable product, we'll need to look at the relative costs and difficulties of reusing Mot/Pirelli hardware vs. building our own. I mean, if building our own hw turns out to be fairly easy and cheap, why would any of us want to bother with Mot or Pirelli? But if building our own hw is going to be a long and expensive venture, getting our fw running on C1xx or Pirelli in the interim would once again become an attractive option, and we'll revisit it then. Nick wrote: > I know Mychaela you have no interest in 3G / 4G hacking > (understandably), An important clarification is in order: the issue is not that I have no interest, the issue is that I/we don't have a leaked copy of any vendor's 3G or 4G source code like we have for GSM. If someone were to publish a leaked fw source for some 3G-capable chipset, including the actual source (as opposed to binary libs) for a working commercial 3G radio protocol stack, I would reciprocate by taking a very serious look into possibly switching from our non-3G-capable Calypso to that other chipset - but I have yet to see any such leaks. > Also the fact that no free GSM stack exists is a really grave state > of affairs, and changing that would be wonderful :) A known-working, commercially proven GSM stack source has been publicly available since 2004 (well before Openmoko!) in the form of the famous TSM30, but it was/is set up to run on unobtainium hardware. Then we got a much newer version with the Peek release some time between 2010 and 2012 - that's the GSM protocol stack source we are using in our FC project as a replacement for the binary libs version used in leo2moko. The bold contribution of our project is in the taking of these available source leaks and transforming them into an actually usable product for freedom-minded end users. But it's just GSM; accomplishing the same for 3G or 4G will have to wait until some (ex-) employee or contractor of one of the companies in that business grows enough moral fortitude to leak some source. VLR, SF _______________________________________________ Community mailing list [email protected] https://www.freecalypso.org/mailman/listinfo/community
