Hi everybody, again with a little delay my update on some Openmoko Engineering news last week:
--- Patents Recently one of our Electrical Engineers gave me two fully spelled out patent applications to sign. What to do with them? On one hand we want to attract and retain good engineers, and in electrical and mechanical engineering patents are an important 'currency' to demonstrate one's value. On the other hand many people in the FOSS community strongly dislike software patents, or even the whole patent system. So we looked at some options: Open Invention Network, http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/ Patent Commons Project, http://www.patent-commons.org/ Peer to Patent Project, http://www.peertopatent.org/ , http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/ Peer To Patent doesn't really solve our problem, and we found both OIN and Patent Commons not to be the best fit for Openmoko's culture. We will continue to watch what these projects are doing. Then a better idea came up. We thought about contacting the highly respected Software Freedom Law Center (http:// www.softwarefreedom.org/) to work out a SFLC Patent License to raise the bar in how a socially responsible Free Software company like Openmoko deals with patents. The process will take quite some time, maybe 8-10 months, but we are very excited to work on this. So for the two patents, I won't sign them, they go back to our parent company FIC and most likely they will file them under their name. Basically Openmoko donated them to FIC. Meanwhile we are working with the SFLC on a much better solution... --- Tichy Charlie (Guillaume Chereau) who works in our Taipei office has been working on a Python project called 'Tichy' for a few months now (http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Tichy ). Recently we started thinking about our next major software moves after Om 2008.8 and as most people already know, it will be based around Python and Mickey's framework (http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/OpenmokoFramework ). So how does Tichy fit in? Tichy basically is one process where multiple Python plugins can run inside. The Python interpreter will only be started once, and Tichy then schedules among the installed Python plugins. Right now it looks like Tichy will become our central 'hub' for Python plugins, we will boot right into Tichy. Charlie needs to make a number of changes to Tichy because more people using it also means more constraints. First he finished the OE recipe and Tichy is now in our daily builds. Next he will move from SDL to EFL/Edje. Marek will port our Settings application (which is already written in Python), on top of Tichy as a plugin. Mirko and Andreas are working on a new telephony plugin code-named 'Paroli' (http://code.google.com/p/paroli/source/browse/#svn/trunk). Those telephony plugins will provide future phone call, SMS etc. functionality and will be using Mickey's framework, currently known to many people as FSO. If all goes well Tichy + Paroli + framework will replace Qtopia in the long run, or rather 'give us another telephony option in addition to Qtopia'. I hope we don't have another GTK+ vs. Qtopia flame war here. In the end this is all Free Software, and they happily compete with each other. We are very much looking forward to the new Qtopia 4.4 release, we hope to get more life into the original GTK+ telephony apps, etc. But anyway, let it be said here - Tichy + Paroli + framework are Openmoko's new major telephony initiative, around Python and d-bus. --- Builds After Julian's announcement on August 14 (http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-August/026491.html ), he and Graeme finished the setup of our new build system last week (http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/devel/2008-August/001452.html ). Two main use cases: 1. end user If you want to install stable software, and only get stable updates, the latest stable image (will overwrite all data on your phone) can be found at: http://downloads.openmoko.org/releases/Om2008.8-update/ If you udate packages in this image, they will come from the stable repository at (updated daily from Holger's stable branch): http://downloads.openmoko.org/repository/Om2008.8/ Holger (zecke) will continue to cherry-pick bug fixes with the right risk/reward ratio into his stable branch. 2. developer If you want bleeding edge, we have created an image that only contains Settings appliation and Installer, nothing else. We call it 'base image'. You can find this base image, updated daily, at: http://downloads.openmoko.org/daily/ By default, this image will fetch updates packages from our 'testing' repository (http://downloads.openmoko.org/repository/testing/). If you want even more fun, change the package repository to 'unstable' (http://downloads.openmoko.org/repository/unstable/). Once you have this base image, you can install the GTK+ telephony apps including gsmd, or Qtopia, or Mickey's framework. Some of what I'm writing is not fully functioning yet. For example the last I heard about the base image was that it's buggy, the Installer and Settings applications don't work out of the box, there is more confusion about keyboard, etc. But we are all focused on this now so I think after a little while it should work as advertised :-) So much for this week, Thanks for helping Openmoko and Best Regards, Wolfgang _______________________________________________ devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
