Rui & Nishit, > I might have to skip GTA03 since I have just spent a huge 300 Euros > for > a GTA02 :) > > I hope the software stack becomes less of a joke in time for GTA03 > or it'll > be hard to get much new customers...
Wow, this is actually really complicated, let me tell you a bit how I see things. First of all thank you very much for buying a Freerunner! And posting so much good stuff to our mailing lists. The Freerunner is our breadwinner right now, Freerunner sales sustain Openmoko, and more importantly they grow the community around a 100% open mobile platform. You contribute in many ways. If you buy the Freerunner as a normal user for daily use (quite a few people use it as a daily phone), then your main contribution is that you buy the phone, give Openmoko some of your hard earned money to support further development. If you want to use it as a daily phone, but run into too many bugs or don't find a distribution that fits your needs, you contribute by writing up bug reports. Sending critical emails to our mailing lists or blogging about the shortcomings of the phone. Both our community and our internal people work tirelessly to address these bugs. Finally if you buy it as a mobile development platform right away, you won't mind the current bugs and shortcomings, but see them as an opportunity to grow Free Software into the mobile world. Also don't forget documentation. Documentation is super important to really make Free Software valuable. Every contribution to our wiki (wiki.openmoko.org) is a way to help Openmoko. The home page has been translated to 23 languages! We are really building a free mobile platform together. The source codes are 100% Free Software. The schematics are open under Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA), so is the complete mechanical design. How does all this relate to GTA03? Well, on one hand internally we work around the clock as if we are trying to start mass production of GTA03 next month. Sean would certainly love to mass produce improved hardware _ANY TIME_ :-) Sean always pushes us to work faster and get things done. On the other hand it's such a huge task. A 100% free and open mobile platform. Thousands of details. And a very small internal engineering force. I have around 30 internal engineers. The typical mobile platform (Nokia/Symbian, WinMobile/HTC, Android/HTC, RIMM, Apple) has over 1000. Is Openmoko planning to hire the missing 970? No. We can only hire very carefully as the current sales of GTA02 allow us to do. Otherwise we would endanger the openness of the platform. The other 970 must come from our community, and increasingly they are. So by buying Freerunners, fixing or writing up bugs, helping to document more aspects of the phone, you help us all get to GTA03 faster. When will GTA03 come out? You tell me. You, and the rest of the community influence it more than you can imagine. We have decided to make changes to the hardware only incrementally, along product lines of our current chip vendors whenever possible, so that as much as possible of the software effort can carry over. We have decided to focus our internal software engineering on the low level, so that we leverage our insider knowledge about the hardware and schematics, while relying on the larger Free Software community to help with higher-level software. You say the current software is a 'joke', which is painful for me but I accept it. From where we all want to be it's a joke, yes. Agreed. So that also answers your question when GTA03 will come out. It's a long way, maybe another year. Let's continue to work, join if you haven't joined yet. Best Regards, Wolfgang On Nov 14, 2008, at 7:06 PM, Rui Miguel Silva Seabra wrote: > On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 06:11:30PM +0800, Wolfgang Spraul wrote: >> built with the Freerunner is awesome. Please continue to buy >> Freerunners and to develop for it, same is happening internally. The >> next phones will build on top of the free platform we have built >> together, the technology investment will carry over. > > I might have to skip GTA03 since I have just spent a huge 300 Euros > for > a GTA02 :) > > I hope the software stack becomes less of a joke in time for GTA03 > or it'll > be hard to get much new customers... > > Rui > > -- > Fnord. > Today is Pungenday, the 26th day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3174 > + No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown > + Whatever you do will be insignificant, > | but it is very important that you do it -- Gandhi > + So let's do it...? > > _______________________________________________ > Openmoko community mailing list > community@lists.openmoko.org > http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
