Joe Friedrichsen wrote: > Given that this phone is meant to be opened and tinkered with
I'm not sure that that is actually the case. (Sean, please correct me if I am wrong in the following - I will be pleasantly surprised if you are able to do so). Yes, the OpenMoko software is meant to be fully open and tinkered with. No doubt about that at all. I haven't read anything in the OpenMoko "manifesto" (i.e. Sean's public slides on what OpenMoko is all about) about the project having a specific goal of designing the hardware to be open and tinkered with in general. Yes, there are instances where it seems that hardware design decisions have been made to allow access to standard interfaces like SPI, Serial, JTAG, for the knowledgeable community hardware developer to use (concidentally, those same interfaces are the ones that the original device hardware designers need access to anyway, so it could easily be just a happy by-product of good engineering), but that's very different from a phone that is "meant to be opened and tinkered with" in a general mass-market sense of that term (which may not be what you intended - I'm just making the distinction clear rather than disagreeing with you specifically). All I'm saying is that it is very clear that OpenMoko (the software) is meant to be fully open, and we should complain loudly if we see anything about the software which is not open (both in the code itself, and the development processes which create and maintain that code). It is not clear at all that the same holds for the hardware (and the processes required to design, manufacture, market and sell that hardware). We should be pleasantly surprised if *any* of that is open, cause that is not what was promised by the OpenMoko concept. We certainly (in my opinion) do *not* have the right to complain when something related to the development of the hardware by FIC (as opposed to the development of the OpenMoko software) is not open. Open hardware development was never promised - only open software development was promised. You can bet that in the future there will probably be totally closed hardware designs which run the totally open OpenMoko software. -- Rod _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
