Dear khang,
Is OpenMoko CPE a good choice for niche or special
applications or not ???
Any ideas ?
If not , many of the developers will go for Android .
That is not good .
Let me use this opportunity to talk a bit about Openmoko and Android.
First of all we really like Android! We don't see Android as
competition, it is complementary to what we are doing and may help us
in many ways.
If you look at the Android software stack, you will notice that they
basically only use the Linux kernel and a few traditional 'helper'
libraries, written in C (jpg, png, etc).
But the bulk of the system is written from scratch. They even have
their own libc! Their own Java virtual machine, their own graphics
system, etc. etc.
I do believe all of this is very healthy. Fresh blood. Take the Dalvik
virtual machine for example. Basically they kick Sun somewhere, but
that may turn out to be a nice wake-up call for something like HotSpot
and similar established Java projects. IcedTea, GNU Classpath, etc.
At the same time they ignore pretty much everything the FOSS community
built over the last 10-20 years.
No X, no d-bus, no standard packaging system, ...
It's a fundamentally different approach from Openmoko.
From outside you first have to decide: Do you go with Android and
step outside of 90% of what the FOSS community has built? Or do you go
with Openmoko, which is a lot closer to something like Ubuntu?
There are many things to learn from Android. I like their 'intent'
system for example. Lots of great software will become available as
Open Source, and will find its way into many places, one of them being
Openmoko.
Getting the complete Android to run side-by-side with GTK or
Enlightenment will be a lot harder than it is with Qtopia for example.
That's because even though Qtopia can be seen as one large monolithic
code base, it is still relatively well connected to many other FOSS
standards. Android is not connected at all, just sitting on top of the
Linux kernel, and several times larger than Qtopia.
Bottom line: We hope the Android sources will be releaesed soon. We
think Android is a great piece of software, will become really
successful, maybe even become the long-awaited 'Linux desktop' one
day? The future looks good for Android.
Openmoko will benefit in many ways, from Google pushing chip vendors
to become more open to lots of high-quality Apache-licensed source
codes being set free, allowing us to cherry-pick from Android into
Openmoko.
Additionally, you can either play with Android itself, or run Openmoko
software on hardware that was opened up thanks to Android.
Hope this helps, everything is moving so this is just a snapshot in
time.
Feedback very welcome, a lot of this is driven by what the community
wants to do. Often people show us how things should be done, not the
other way round ;-)
Wolfgang
On Apr 4, 2008, at 11:32 AM, khang wrote:
Taiwan CPE developers of WiMax (etc..) are looking for a new
OS/plateform ,
so their applications won't be limited .
We are planning
1.City surveillance (live project) --- installing digital
camera wirelessly sending " clear " image back to control
center.
2.Remote medical care --- sending medical data / warning
signals wirelessly to Hospital / doctors
3.Home security --- remote monitoring home status including
old people and child safty
using WiMax network ( mobile Internet ) .
Is OpenMoko CPE a good choice for niche or special
applications or not ???
Any ideas ?
If not , many of the developers will go for Android .
That is not good .
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