<rant> Openmoko (the company) doesn't have any responsibility to be open to the community. I personally do appreciate when they are, but I can see why they might want to be a little more closed. I think a lot of time is spent arguing with community members over things that aren't extremely important in the long-term.
When it comes right down to it, there is no reason for them to tell us everything that is going on. Let them make their design decisions so that they can make better use of their time in accomplishing their goals, whatever they may be. Chances are you won't agree with some of their design goals. They can't please everyone, so they shouldn't try to. The beauty of open source is that you can change it however you want. If you disagree strongly enough, you make a fork or write something yourself. Companies involved in open source projects aren't involved solely for the sake of open source (although they are usually very good contributors). They have goals they are trying to accomplish -- like finally getting a usable software stack for a phone. They also have to make money somewhere. If by saving the effort of communicating with everyone who thinks it should be their business is allowing them to spend more time making a usable set of applications, more power to them. They are still giving you the source, and if you don't like something I'm sure patches are quite welcome. Look at what happens every time a hardware-related (ie. gta03) post occurs on this list: there is a very strong split between people who want mutually-exclusive features, followed by a lot of arguing about which is better, when it really comes down to a matter of preference (the resistive vs. capacitive argument reminds me a lot of the stereotypical vim vs. emacs comparison which is guaranteed to start a flamewar on any LUG mailing list). </rant> -- Eldon Koyle _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
