Hi Mickey,

> Am 24.07.2017 um 14:37 schrieb Dr. Michael Lauer <[email protected]>:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I’m not sure how many people are still subscribed to planet.openmoko.org 
> <http://planet.openmoko.org/>, so
> I’m linking to my post here as well:
> 
> http://www.vanille.de/openmoko-10-years-after-mickeys-story/ 
> <http://www.vanille.de/openmoko-10-years-after-mickeys-story/>
> 
> Depending on how long you are following the OpenMoko story, you might remember
> and/or recognize a thing or two.

Not only one or two but many more :)

Although I was never member of OpenMoko, I was part of the Zaurus community and
knew about the wishes for a Linux smartphone (and even some Zaurus based 
protoype).

And I did get the announcement and invitation to the conference in Amsterdam
on my desk and was curious who the mystery speaker could be.

Unfortunately, I did not get the budget for traveling from my former employer. 
So I was
eagerly waiting to read about it and followed closely Heise and all other 
channels available
back then.

Receiving my Neo 1973 in Summer 2007 (9 years and 50 weeks ago) and connecting 
it
for the first time through USB and being able to ssh to the device was a nice 
experience.

The rest of my story is quickly told: I became a reseller (ca. 2k of the 10k) 
of the Neo
Freerunner. I did run our own exhibition on SYSTEMS 2008 fair and participated 
several
times at FOSEDM. At that time we also started our yearly community 
meeting/workshop
in Munich which was the core of this Tinkerphones community.

After the OpenMoko activities ended, I looked around for comparable replacement 
products
for the online shop, but there weren't any (except an attempt to launch a Letux 
380 [1]).

Finally we decided to develop our own: the GTA04 based on the OMAP3 BeagleBoard.

It took just 2 years more than anticipated, but was finally done. The only 
thing we never
managed for financial reasons was to get to our own plastics case.

Then the big steamers like Apple, Samsung and Google had accelerated and speeded
past our rowboat...

But we did not submerge. We are just too slow to be more than vintage and a 
vaudeville
curiosity.

So we still work to keep the GTA04 (and the Neo Freerunner cases, speakers, 
power
supplies) active and busy. The latest thing is that we got the GTA04 camera 
working (again).

How about my view of the future: it is just a matter of finances defining what 
we get. If we
really really want to have something different from the mainstream, we must be 
willing to
pay something (money, time, enthusiasm, insistence, activity, knowledge, ..) 
more for it.
And we must work together.

> 
> Hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Yes, I enjoyed reading this very much! There is a lot of really interesting 
material I
have never seen before.

> #good-old-days

BR and thanks for investing so much time writing about all this,
Nikolaus

[1]: https://shop.goldelico.com/wiki.php?page=Letux%20380

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