Dear All, The 16th community update has been released. There has been lot more activity these weeks with the news of future release schedule and feature list of Om2009,Kernel milestone list for a stable kernel,new mailing list for GTA03 ideas and much more. Read on.
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Community_Updates/April_17%2C_2009 I being fairly new to Openmoko, decided to take an interview of Wolfgang Spraul to post for the community update.This answered the questions I had on what work we would be doing post GTA03 suspension,where we are heading to,improvements and setbacks we as a company faced and more generally his views on open source.This helps me understand the process and company much more.I hope this interests some others too. Enjoy reading! 1) What is your background, for example your previous work? Tons of software, from filesystem drivers (MacOpener) to mobile applications (Documents To Go). Was involved in total failures (TI Advantra), a .com business (3Box in Germany), and 12 years with DataViz in Connecticut where I learnt an unbelievable amount of good stuff! When you start working somewhere, make sure you can learn something, and there are people you can learn from. I was just lucky. So I was coding pretty much every day of my life since I was 12 years old, for about 20 years until early 2007 when I took 6 months off to think about a new direction. 2) How did you get involved with Openmoko? I was following OpenEZX, and one day Harald (whom I had never met in person at that time) emails me saying he got an invitation to go to Taiwan for some phone project. I was sitting in DataViz's Connecticut office and thought "wow - where is Taiwan and how come they are doing Linux phones there?". This was before Openmoko was started, maybe early 2006 or so. From then on it took quite some time, I had a lot of work to finish at DataViz, Harald introduced me to Sean whom I met for the first time at Paulaner in Shanghai in September 2006, for some good German beer and sausage :-) I finally joined full-time in August 2007 or so. 3) There is no shortage of recent fluctuation at Openmoko. What improvements or set backs have you seen since the project was initially launched? Oh wow. Too many, a book should be written ;-) Improvements were made mostly in Western software engineers understanding the Eastern hardware development environment and culture much better. So many people visited Taipei, we have a 4-bedroom apartment for visiting FOSS developers, we have shuffled so many people to SMT factories, our factory in Suzhou, etc. Vice versa, the English skills in our Taipei office have improved a lot (we hired a teacher). By now we must have one of the best English-speaking teams in Taiwan or China... Setbacks? It took us forever to get the buzz and other audio issues fixed, and until today we cannot really deliver it into the field. Distributors like Tuxbrain help us improve the situation, but we should have done better in the first place. Another one - although we realized 'lack of focus' and never-ending changes to GTA03 early on, we were unable to stop it, until it was too late and the whole design was ruined. 4) What is your take on Android? Great stuff. Google knows what they are doing, they have some of the brightest and best people in the industry. The challenge I see for them now is to demonstrate the cost savings that are typically associated with open source to their device manufacturing Hold Dena Bank with a target of Rs 43-50 and keep a stop loss of Rs 36, says Simi Bhaumik, technical analyst, on Zee Business. The stock is currently trading at Rs 40, up 9.1% on the BSE. » Send to friends partners. Right now I believe many OEMs are overwhelmed by the complexity of Android, and the furious pace at which it is developed. But over time Google will figure this out, and I believe Android will become a spectacular success. The first real 'network operating system' to me. Will show up in netbooks, notebooks, portable media players, digital picture frames, etc. And Google has a functioning business model behind it too, so the party can go on for a while. Lots of good open source software is written, maybe over time the community finds out how to extract and cut the best pieces into more modular libraries and packages. 5) There is a variety of opinions on what is 'open' these days. What is your definition of an open device? Most normal end users I talk to think that open means that a lot of interesting applications can easily be installed on a device. In that sense I believe that the Apple iPhone is leading the pack in 'openness' right now since they invest a ton of money and brains into their SDK/IDE, APIs, libraries, etc. And amazing applications come out of it. A second, older definition is the classical 'open' as in 100% Free Software. Openmoko extended this even further by also releasing mechanical CAD files under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license, hardware schematics, even our complete production testing software. I hope we will continue to do so for future devices. The limits of this kind of openness have by far not been reached yet - there are a number of closed firmwares still (Wi-Fi, GPS, GSM), even Openmoko hasn't released the hardware GERBER files under an open license, etc. A third definition I see on the horizon is 'open' as in interoperability between devices. More and more computing devices have RF built in. Maybe one day, people will say a device is 'open' if it can interact with many other devices. If it cannot, or can only interact with other devices from the same company, people may see the device as 'closed'. This is a definition I believe Openmoko should pay attention to, if RF interfaces are locked down by other vendors (even if restricted programming APIs are available), Openmoko devices could be different, and interesting applications would become possible. 6) What are the recent organizational changes wrt to engineering? The biggest change is that my engineering budget was cut a lot, and my job was to implement those cuts. We tried to do that in a way that would focus the money in areas where the community is weakest, such as hardware, or where we could enable others, such as the Om2009 distribution, daily builds and kernel work. 7) What is the work currently happening wrt GTA02 improvements ? There is a big push towards Om2009, a new software we hope to release in June or July. Also we are still trying to track down some more GSM Calypso bugs, such as the well-known #1024 recamping, and also some GPRS instability problems we have found out about recently. Other than that - fixing bugs from trac. 8) If paroli is the answer to above .Then does paroli address all the major issues we had in Om2008 releases? I think the major issues we had with Om2008 were kernel related. Paroli is a new telephony application, written in Python on top of FSO and thus much more modular and extensible than what we had with Qtopia in Om2008. As for the Om20008 kernel bugs, yes, I believe the state of our kernel now is much better than it was in 2008, hopefully we can keep it there and fix some more bugs until the release. 9)More on Plan B and when it is expected? I thought it's an open hair straightener? 10) What is the future of Om2009 after june release,will it continue with regular updates? We will try to find out what people want. Anybody still downloading the GTA01 images? Should we rather focus on the kernel and support other distributions, or do more application level work? etc. What makes the real Free Sofware world so different is the degree of modularity that you can find for example in something like Debian. It's the result of endless experiments, ripping and mixing, forking, branching, arguments over which direction a particular piece of software should take, etc. So I'm not worried if Openmoko's software activities look less thought through, or more chaotic, than for example Android. We are constantly measuring the pulse of the community, where things are headed - should we switch from ETK to Elementary, should we go back from Paroli to Tichy, from Python to Vala, and so on. 11) Will openmoko continue work on any phone projects that is intended for general users after plan B? Oh definitely. Openmoko has created so much momentum, both as a brand and in terms of people, current and former. Many of these people have learnt a lot, they are now inside or outside of Openmoko, and they are passionate about making open devices. I'm not sure whether it will be a feature phone, or smart phone. Based around an ARM core or maybe MIPS core (some MIPS companies are eager to enter the cell phone space). We will try to be much smarter in using partners and recycling existing stuff, whether that's GTA02, or even Android. But when it ships, it needs to be the most open phone out there, and it needs to have the best hardware quality of any phone. That's something we learnt the hard way with GTA01 and GTA02. Where a typical phone company would cover up hardware problems with software workarounds, in an open phone that's not really possible because the whole point of openness is that you can take it and do new things. But then how can the hardware manufacturer foresee and test all these unexpected new things? Next time around we will need to be much smarter about this. Rather just ship a phone with 2 features that are deeply and thoroughly tested, than 10 features that are just quickly thrown together. The quality requirements of future phones are also the reason why I enjoy cleaning up and fixing GTA02 now. Both hardware and software problems. Cleaning up the mess you created yourself is one of the best ways to reflect, learn, and be ready to do better next time. Regards, Sushama _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community