10 ms·

OpenMoko: 10 Years After

215 points by Kostic 9y ago

rosser 9y ago
I still have my Freerunner in a box somewhere. So much promise... I keep wondering if there's something I could do with it. At this point, though, it's probably more a historical footnote than anything.
DanBC 9y ago
Here's a small discussion from 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14388
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
msla 9y ago
Since the main page is a bit slow, here's a mirror: https://archive.is/8wYHe https://archive.is/8wYHe
eagsalazar2 9y ago
This is a project I followed pretty closely at the time and I always felt it was doomed. There were probably 100 reasons it failed that I wasn't aware of but it seemed at the time like people really wanted the open software and platform but OpenMoki got religious about hardware which no one really wanted or cared about. Ultimately this was the route Android went and we see the results. It is classic for FOSS wonks (I am one!) to forget that most people don't care about the principles of FOSS, they just care about the practical implications of FOSS which aren't always the same thing.
- wolfgke 9y ago
  I see a contradiction in your arguments: > it seemed at the time like people really wanted the open software and platform vs. > It is classic for FOSS wonks (I am one!) to forget that most people don't care about the principles of FOSS
  - eagsalazar2 9y ago
    How is that a contradiction? My point is that open software has large and immediate positive implications for end users but hardware does not.
    - wolfgke 9y ago
      If you really want an open software and platform (statement 1) you care about the principles of FOSS (a contradiction to statement 2), since if you only want some specific side benefits that FOSS provides, there exist "better" (quotes because as an FOSS fan these are note better) options.
      - micahbright 9y ago
        No true Scotsman fallacy. "If you really want an open source platform" is interpreted to mean different things to different people. Open source may literally mean "open source" without the associated zealous frothing at the mouth RMS association. No contradiction here.
  - Qwertious 9y ago
    There's the community and then there's paying customers. The former want open software and platform, the latter want a functioning phone. They're both "people", but they're not necessarily the same "people".
    - wolfgke 9y ago
      But if > it seemed at the time like people really wanted the open software and platform is true, there should nevertheless be a sufficiently large audience. The product will perhaps never become mainstream, but the audience should be sufficiently large that a company can survive on them as customers.
- problems 9y ago
  Yeah, Android put the effort into software and let manufacturers deal with the hardware. It's sad that their approach failed though, I'd really like a modern device with something like OsmocomBB available right about now...
wwweston 9y ago
Doesn't close on a bright note: >However, the sad truth is that it looks like there is no business case anymore for a truly open platform based on custom-designed hardware, since people refuse to spend extra money for tweakability, freedom, and security. Despite us living in times where privacy is massively endangered. If anyone out there thinks different and plans a project, please holler and get me on board!
- notspanishflu 9y ago
  I've hope projects like Halium, UBports, Plasma Mobile, etc end up bringing an open hardware project.
  - vedanta 9y ago
    Yeah, it seems like mobile oses are about as common as Linux distros in 1995. Sailfish, Maru, lineage, among the two you mention. If you have a nexus 5 or one plus one, you're in luck. I recently tried lineage, ubports and plasma, and though I liked ubports, lineage was a breath of fresh air. Selinux, opengapps, regular privacy notifications, twrp, and privacy and security seem to have not taken a back seat in general. Sign me up. If there hadn't been contracts 10yrs ago, I probably would have gotten an openmoko. Wanted one badly. If lineage, ubports, and plasma among others can keep developing alternatives to stock android, no reason to see why at least some or all hardware doesn't follow. It's taken AMD the better part of 10 years to have open source drivers that are as good as their closed source drivers on almost all of their GPUs if I'm not mistaken.
    - striking 9y ago
      > If you have a nexus 5 or one plus one, you're in luck. Which raises the question: if you want a phone that can run a FOSS mobile OS, what do you choose today? Nexus 5 and OPO were great a few years back (I bought the latter) but there is a need in the marketplace for (read: I need) an updated product that can run such a mobile OS.
      - 9y ago
throw7 9y ago
I could be wrong, but my feeling at the time was there was a lack of experience of a strong low-level hardware designer. I remember bug #1024... all I really wanted to use my freerunner daily was making/receiving calls (you know basic phone stuff), something flip phones at the time were absolutely rock-solid at.
paulborza 9y ago
I was one of the Google Summer of Code "interns" for OpenMoko back in 2008. I was so excited to get the free OpenMoko device and actually implemented gesture recognition and screen orientation for the device part of the GSoC project. Here's a video of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2S2rQUETwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2S2rQUETwc But let me tell you about the device: 1. You couldn't even make a phone call with it. There was a hardware bug that stopped it from making phone calls. It was basically a PDA... 2. If the battery ever ran out, you couldn't start the phone anymore. You had to have a spare Nokia phone that you'd use to charge that battery. Thank god they were using Nokia-compatible batteries. The gist was, never ever to let the phone's battery reach 0%. 3. The development of any UX components was cumbersome. They always insisted in supporting GTK and another platform which I forgot its name. They were such a small team and yet they were building two projects which essentially were doing the same thing. Why?! Those three were just a few problems. The Freerunner was definitely not a user-friendly phone.
- joshumax 9y ago
  I had issues making calls on my Freerunner, sure, and it certainly wasn't very user friendly (even flashing replicant to it resulted in a very buggy daily driver) but I did enjoy the phone for what it was; a fun platform to hack around with and one of the first (and perhaps almost the only?) mobile device with hackability not only in mind, but centric to its design. I hope alternatives like the Neo900 make it off the ground, but I'm not holding my breath. Most people just don't seem to care about open hardware when they could be getting the latest, fastest SoC for their $varPhone. Maybe it makes me weird that I'd rather use an open device with a single ARM core at 800Mhz than a closed one that uses the Snapdragon 835...
  - narag 9y ago
    Maybe it makes me weird that I'd rather use an open device with a single ARM core... IMHO, it's neither a question of being weird nor about the power of the phone. The problem is that choosing an architecture that isn't mass produced, you are doomed to disappear no matter what. I wouldn't care to use an underpowered phone, provided that it's cheap and widely available, being "cheap" an (important) part of "widely available". A hackable phone would generate interesting apps for a wide market. But you need that there are a lot of people that can buy it and has some problem accessing an Android and its apps.
mikepurvis 9y ago
I'm grateful to OpenMoko every time I fire up dfu-util to flash something over USB.
lamby 9y ago
Ah, nostalgia. I remember attending a big OpenMoko announcement as FOSDEM. Naturally, it being FOSDEM, it was allocated a tiny room which was completely and utterly packed. g
phaedrus 9y ago
I bought a Neo Freerunner when it came out. I tried make it my daily phone, and invested a lot of time hacking on it - in the end a wasted effort. There were show-stopper bugs and face-palm-worthy design missteps at every level of the stack. Its developer community was fragmented among a half-dozen different distros from birth; Openmoko themselves forked their own distro so that even if you wanted to run the "official" one, you had two incompatible choices - and neither the two "official" distros, nor any of the user-developed ones, supported all of the hardware + apps necessary to actually use this thing as a phone. (I.e. one might have audio but not support making calls; another might support making calls but no audio volume; a third might lose all your contacts, etc.) If we could have taken the union of features from all these distros, it could have had a great smartphone OS; that just goes to show what gratuitous fragmentation cost us. As for hardware, we were screwed from both sides by the hardware companies (flaky drivers) and Openmoko's own circuit design. Due to driver/card incompatibility, I never found a high capacity SD card which would work completely reliably in the phone; only the cramped 512MB SD card which came with the phone worked reliably. Mind you most of the time the problem would show up after you spent a few hours compiling & setting up Gentoo or whatever on a new 8GB SD card only to have the 3rd boot fail with a corrupted card. And in the circuit design side, from the specific problems the phone's board had, I get the feeling Openmoko's engineers were computer engineers but not very knowledgeable in audio electronics. They failed to properly separate and route the audio ground, nor to give a good range of audio volumes, and connections for the mixer chip were a mess. Actually, electrical noise was a problem in other areas, as well; accessing the SD card generated noise or RF leakage which would cause the GPS unit to lose it's lock. (So good luck loading a map while navigating.) Interference in bandwidth (albeit just in contention for buses, not actually noise) was also responsible for the limitation of not being able to use the SD card and talk to the video processor at full rate at the same time - so playing video from the card was not workable, either. I had some fun with the device, learned a little bit, and ultimately rebuilt it into a larger case with a larger battery and an amplifier for the earpiece. However, I would have been better served if I had done all these things on a development board, rather than being tricked into buying a prototype development board shaped like a phone. The experience led to me "missing the boat" on getting into mobile development; it took a long time for me to get another smartphone, because I had blown my money and my efforts on the freerunner. For the next couple years whenever I would consider getting another smartphone my then-wife (now ex) would counter "yeah that's what you said when you wanted to buy the freerunner - and you have that and you don't even use it!"
Rjevski 9y ago
As usual here's another victim of the free software problem - too much emphasis on freedom and not enough on actual functionality. I don't care how free your phone is, if it can't make phone calls I don't want it, nor does anyone else.
sargun 9y ago
OpenMoko holds a special place in my heart. It was the first project that I contributed to in any meaningful fashion. I wrote a couple patches to the Python implementation of FSO. It taught me a ton about how GSM, embedded devices, and power saving worked. I used it as an IoT device, long before IoT was a common thing. Not many people know this, but OpenMoko was largely rolled by Dash Navigation -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko#Dash_Express https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko#Dash_Express. This gave Sean and Co. the cash and ability to develop the OpenMoko, but unfortunately, Dash failed, because as a CNAV device, it was too little, too late as compared to the ultra-converged cell phone. I wish that they would have found other entities to back the project, but the market just wasn't there yet.
feborges 9y ago
I remember John "Maddog" Hall speaking about it in Brazil. I was just a kid at the time.
- mattl 9y ago
  Yeah, Maddog had something he was running that was supporting them with Android. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koolu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koolu
k__ 9y ago
I remember 2007, when I started my bachelors degree some senior students had one and were so proud. Half a year later, nobody talked about it anymore and it was iPhone all the way.
acidtrucks 9y ago
I've always wanted to run openmoko. If I could run it on modern phones and replace android, I totally would.
nickpsecurity 9y ago
Has anyone tried to approach the Shenzhen companies doing quality knockoffs of iPhones and Galaxies about doing a FOSS phone with OpenMoko features? I mean, they clearly can build one. Question is whether they would for a reasonable amount of money.
- kasbah 9y ago
  The problem is these would be gonkai phones (see link). Within the western legal framework of "intellectual property" you can't open source what you don't own. The impedance miss-match between the two working methodologies makes any conversion a lot of work, e.g. the Fernvale effort to make a open hardware _dumb_ phone platform: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297
odammit 9y ago
I bought one of these way back when. It was the model with the hole in it for hooking to a lanyard or something else absurd... It was so dumb and jittery I microwaved it a little and then swatted it off my roof with a tennis racket. Was fun, would destroy again 10/10
scarhill 9y ago
I also still have my Freerunner in a drawer somewhere. I bought the phone early on and then ended up starting the android-on-freerunner project[1], when Koolu, the company that had begun an Android port, abandoned the project. I used the Cupcake version as a daily driver for quite a while, but it was never anywhere near as stable as a "real" phone. 1 - https://gitlab.com/android-on-freerunner/android-on-freerunner/wikis/home https://gitlab.com/android-on-freerunner/android-on-freerunn...
uberneo 9y ago
I still remember how happy i was holding the first Opensource Linux phone in my hands back in 2008 . It was fun to compile a basic c program using gcc . I remember my first hack of my life #1024 http://neofundas.blogspot.ie/2009/09/1024-hardware-fixdeep-sleep.html http://neofundas.blogspot.ie/2009/09/1024-hardware-fixdeep-s... Also remember when at 6.30 AM in morning you have to type "ps -ef | grep -i alarm" , find the process id and then kill -9 id to stop the alarm and that too using the stylus. Definitely these commands will make sure that you will wake up 100% , a perfect alarm :)
Nursie 9y ago
I loved my freerunner but the article hit the nail on the head - there seemed to be a whole bunch of half-finished software stacks for it, rather than ome complete one. The next one, which was definitely going to be the real future of Openmoko, was always a few months away, and as soon as it got close you'd find out the team had ditched the framework and were already working on the next next one. As a result, as someone who had wanted to jump in and start experimenting with writing application code, there wasn't really a platform to do that on. So after a few months of frustratingly dropped calls, or silent calls and unsent text messages, I went out and bought a small, shiny feature phone and didn't look at another smartphone until the nokia N900 showed up.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  That seems to be an ongoing problem with FOSS. Because nobody is there to crack whips about quality targets etc, devs keep wondering off path as they run out of shiny features to implement, or find themselves going "I could do X if only...", and thus a new codebase is birthed...
  - majewsky 9y ago
    Or rather, it makes you wonder if the devs ever used the software themselves. In my experience, above all else, dogfooding is what gets software into a productive state.
  - Nursie 9y ago
    The major problem in this case (IMHO) was that there was someone to crack the whip, and they didn't do it! The project was run by a company who had employees and at least one manager, but nobody was setting a direction for those employees to move in, and making the hard decisions (like "no, we're sticking with this stack to get something stable and production ready, even if it is flawed").
btcnnewsdaily 9y ago
I remember these, definitely had it's unique features about them at the time.
toyg 9y ago
I'm genuinely surprised to find out, in this thread, that so many people actually bought an Openmoko device. I only remember it being a perennial work-in-progress, and when they eventually started actually selling something, it was so painfully obsolete that I couldn't get myself to consider it (unlike the N900).
- cesarb 9y ago
  It's sampling bias: the sort of people who would buy an Openmoko device even before it has working software are also the sort of people who would browse HN regularly.
  - wink 9y ago
    Or even more so, comment on this thread. I wasn't going to, because I didn't have one - but one of my coworkers at the time had one, and we absolutely made fun of him that he had to first get a new kernel to be able to either send a text message or make a call (don't remember which of the two, the other one didn't work at all).

215 points by Kostic 9y ago

I still have my Freerunner in a box somewhere. So much promise... I keep wondering if there's something I could do with it. At this point, though, it's probably more a historical footnote than anything.

DanBC 9y ago

Here's a small discussion from 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14388

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

msla 9y ago

Since the main page is a bit slow, here's a mirror: https://archive.is/8wYHe https://archive.is/8wYHe

eagsalazar2 9y ago

This is a project I followed pretty closely at the time and I always felt it was doomed. There were probably 100 reasons it failed that I wasn't aware of but it seemed at the time like people really wanted the open software and platform but OpenMoki got religious about hardware which no one really wanted or cared about. Ultimately this was the route Android went and we see the results. It is classic for FOSS wonks (I am one!) to forget that most people don't care about the principles of FOSS, they just care about the practical implications of FOSS which aren't always the same thing.

wolfgke 9y ago
I see a contradiction in your arguments: > it seemed at the time like people really wanted the open software and platform vs. > It is classic for FOSS wonks (I am one!) to forget that most people don't care about the principles of FOSS
- eagsalazar2 9y ago
  How is that a contradiction? My point is that open software has large and immediate positive implications for end users but hardware does not.
  - wolfgke 9y ago
    If you really want an open software and platform (statement 1) you care about the principles of FOSS (a contradiction to statement 2), since if you only want some specific side benefits that FOSS provides, there exist "better" (quotes because as an FOSS fan these are note better) options.
    - micahbright 9y ago
      No true Scotsman fallacy. "If you really want an open source platform" is interpreted to mean different things to different people. Open source may literally mean "open source" without the associated zealous frothing at the mouth RMS association. No contradiction here.
- Qwertious 9y ago
  There's the community and then there's paying customers. The former want open software and platform, the latter want a functioning phone. They're both "people", but they're not necessarily the same "people".
  - wolfgke 9y ago
    But if > it seemed at the time like people really wanted the open software and platform is true, there should nevertheless be a sufficiently large audience. The product will perhaps never become mainstream, but the audience should be sufficiently large that a company can survive on them as customers.
problems 9y ago
Yeah, Android put the effort into software and let manufacturers deal with the hardware. It's sad that their approach failed though, I'd really like a modern device with something like OsmocomBB available right about now...

wwweston 9y ago

Doesn't close on a bright note: >However, the sad truth is that it looks like there is no business case anymore for a truly open platform based on custom-designed hardware, since people refuse to spend extra money for tweakability, freedom, and security. Despite us living in times where privacy is massively endangered. If anyone out there thinks different and plans a project, please holler and get me on board!

notspanishflu 9y ago
I've hope projects like Halium, UBports, Plasma Mobile, etc end up bringing an open hardware project.
- vedanta 9y ago
  Yeah, it seems like mobile oses are about as common as Linux distros in 1995. Sailfish, Maru, lineage, among the two you mention. If you have a nexus 5 or one plus one, you're in luck. I recently tried lineage, ubports and plasma, and though I liked ubports, lineage was a breath of fresh air. Selinux, opengapps, regular privacy notifications, twrp, and privacy and security seem to have not taken a back seat in general. Sign me up. If there hadn't been contracts 10yrs ago, I probably would have gotten an openmoko. Wanted one badly. If lineage, ubports, and plasma among others can keep developing alternatives to stock android, no reason to see why at least some or all hardware doesn't follow. It's taken AMD the better part of 10 years to have open source drivers that are as good as their closed source drivers on almost all of their GPUs if I'm not mistaken.
  - striking 9y ago
    > If you have a nexus 5 or one plus one, you're in luck. Which raises the question: if you want a phone that can run a FOSS mobile OS, what do you choose today? Nexus 5 and OPO were great a few years back (I bought the latter) but there is a need in the marketplace for (read: I need) an updated product that can run such a mobile OS.
    - 9y ago

throw7 9y ago

I could be wrong, but my feeling at the time was there was a lack of experience of a strong low-level hardware designer. I remember bug #1024... all I really wanted to use my freerunner daily was making/receiving calls (you know basic phone stuff), something flip phones at the time were absolutely rock-solid at.

paulborza 9y ago

I was one of the Google Summer of Code "interns" for OpenMoko back in 2008. I was so excited to get the free OpenMoko device and actually implemented gesture recognition and screen orientation for the device part of the GSoC project. Here's a video of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2S2rQUETwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2S2rQUETwc But let me tell you about the device: 1. You couldn't even make a phone call with it. There was a hardware bug that stopped it from making phone calls. It was basically a PDA... 2. If the battery ever ran out, you couldn't start the phone anymore. You had to have a spare Nokia phone that you'd use to charge that battery. Thank god they were using Nokia-compatible batteries. The gist was, never ever to let the phone's battery reach 0%. 3. The development of any UX components was cumbersome. They always insisted in supporting GTK and another platform which I forgot its name. They were such a small team and yet they were building two projects which essentially were doing the same thing. Why?! Those three were just a few problems. The Freerunner was definitely not a user-friendly phone.

joshumax 9y ago
I had issues making calls on my Freerunner, sure, and it certainly wasn't very user friendly (even flashing replicant to it resulted in a very buggy daily driver) but I did enjoy the phone for what it was; a fun platform to hack around with and one of the first (and perhaps almost the only?) mobile device with hackability not only in mind, but centric to its design. I hope alternatives like the Neo900 make it off the ground, but I'm not holding my breath. Most people just don't seem to care about open hardware when they could be getting the latest, fastest SoC for their $varPhone. Maybe it makes me weird that I'd rather use an open device with a single ARM core at 800Mhz than a closed one that uses the Snapdragon 835...
- narag 9y ago
  Maybe it makes me weird that I'd rather use an open device with a single ARM core... IMHO, it's neither a question of being weird nor about the power of the phone. The problem is that choosing an architecture that isn't mass produced, you are doomed to disappear no matter what. I wouldn't care to use an underpowered phone, provided that it's cheap and widely available, being "cheap" an (important) part of "widely available". A hackable phone would generate interesting apps for a wide market. But you need that there are a lot of people that can buy it and has some problem accessing an Android and its apps.

mikepurvis 9y ago

I'm grateful to OpenMoko every time I fire up dfu-util to flash something over USB.

lamby 9y ago

Ah, nostalgia. I remember attending a big OpenMoko announcement as FOSDEM. Naturally, it being FOSDEM, it was allocated a tiny room which was completely and utterly packed. g

phaedrus 9y ago

I bought a Neo Freerunner when it came out. I tried make it my daily phone, and invested a lot of time hacking on it - in the end a wasted effort. There were show-stopper bugs and face-palm-worthy design missteps at every level of the stack. Its developer community was fragmented among a half-dozen different distros from birth; Openmoko themselves forked their own distro so that even if you wanted to run the "official" one, you had two incompatible choices - and neither the two "official" distros, nor any of the user-developed ones, supported all of the hardware + apps necessary to actually use this thing as a phone. (I.e. one might have audio but not support making calls; another might support making calls but no audio volume; a third might lose all your contacts, etc.) If we could have taken the union of features from all these distros, it could have had a great smartphone OS; that just goes to show what gratuitous fragmentation cost us. As for hardware, we were screwed from both sides by the hardware companies (flaky drivers) and Openmoko's own circuit design. Due to driver/card incompatibility, I never found a high capacity SD card which would work completely reliably in the phone; only the cramped 512MB SD card which came with the phone worked reliably. Mind you most of the time the problem would show up after you spent a few hours compiling & setting up Gentoo or whatever on a new 8GB SD card only to have the 3rd boot fail with a corrupted card. And in the circuit design side, from the specific problems the phone's board had, I get the feeling Openmoko's engineers were computer engineers but not very knowledgeable in audio electronics. They failed to properly separate and route the audio ground, nor to give a good range of audio volumes, and connections for the mixer chip were a mess. Actually, electrical noise was a problem in other areas, as well; accessing the SD card generated noise or RF leakage which would cause the GPS unit to lose it's lock. (So good luck loading a map while navigating.) Interference in bandwidth (albeit just in contention for buses, not actually noise) was also responsible for the limitation of not being able to use the SD card and talk to the video processor at full rate at the same time - so playing video from the card was not workable, either. I had some fun with the device, learned a little bit, and ultimately rebuilt it into a larger case with a larger battery and an amplifier for the earpiece. However, I would have been better served if I had done all these things on a development board, rather than being tricked into buying a prototype development board shaped like a phone. The experience led to me "missing the boat" on getting into mobile development; it took a long time for me to get another smartphone, because I had blown my money and my efforts on the freerunner. For the next couple years whenever I would consider getting another smartphone my then-wife (now ex) would counter "yeah that's what you said when you wanted to buy the freerunner - and you have that and you don't even use it!"

Rjevski 9y ago

As usual here's another victim of the free software problem - too much emphasis on freedom and not enough on actual functionality. I don't care how free your phone is, if it can't make phone calls I don't want it, nor does anyone else.

sargun 9y ago

OpenMoko holds a special place in my heart. It was the first project that I contributed to in any meaningful fashion. I wrote a couple patches to the Python implementation of FSO. It taught me a ton about how GSM, embedded devices, and power saving worked. I used it as an IoT device, long before IoT was a common thing. Not many people know this, but OpenMoko was largely rolled by Dash Navigation -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko#Dash_Express https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko#Dash_Express. This gave Sean and Co. the cash and ability to develop the OpenMoko, but unfortunately, Dash failed, because as a CNAV device, it was too little, too late as compared to the ultra-converged cell phone. I wish that they would have found other entities to back the project, but the market just wasn't there yet.

feborges 9y ago

I remember John "Maddog" Hall speaking about it in Brazil. I was just a kid at the time.

mattl 9y ago
Yeah, Maddog had something he was running that was supporting them with Android. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koolu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koolu

k__ 9y ago

I remember 2007, when I started my bachelors degree some senior students had one and were so proud. Half a year later, nobody talked about it anymore and it was iPhone all the way.

acidtrucks 9y ago

I've always wanted to run openmoko. If I could run it on modern phones and replace android, I totally would.

nickpsecurity 9y ago

Has anyone tried to approach the Shenzhen companies doing quality knockoffs of iPhones and Galaxies about doing a FOSS phone with OpenMoko features? I mean, they clearly can build one. Question is whether they would for a reasonable amount of money.

kasbah 9y ago
The problem is these would be gonkai phones (see link). Within the western legal framework of "intellectual property" you can't open source what you don't own. The impedance miss-match between the two working methodologies makes any conversion a lot of work, e.g. the Fernvale effort to make a open hardware _dumb_ phone platform: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297

odammit 9y ago

I bought one of these way back when. It was the model with the hole in it for hooking to a lanyard or something else absurd... It was so dumb and jittery I microwaved it a little and then swatted it off my roof with a tennis racket. Was fun, would destroy again 10/10

scarhill 9y ago

I also still have my Freerunner in a drawer somewhere. I bought the phone early on and then ended up starting the android-on-freerunner project[1], when Koolu, the company that had begun an Android port, abandoned the project. I used the Cupcake version as a daily driver for quite a while, but it was never anywhere near as stable as a "real" phone. 1 - https://gitlab.com/android-on-freerunner/android-on-freerunner/wikis/home https://gitlab.com/android-on-freerunner/android-on-freerunn...

uberneo 9y ago

I still remember how happy i was holding the first Opensource Linux phone in my hands back in 2008 . It was fun to compile a basic c program using gcc . I remember my first hack of my life #1024 http://neofundas.blogspot.ie/2009/09/1024-hardware-fixdeep-sleep.html http://neofundas.blogspot.ie/2009/09/1024-hardware-fixdeep-s... Also remember when at 6.30 AM in morning you have to type "ps -ef | grep -i alarm" , find the process id and then kill -9 id to stop the alarm and that too using the stylus. Definitely these commands will make sure that you will wake up 100% , a perfect alarm :)

Nursie 9y ago

I loved my freerunner but the article hit the nail on the head - there seemed to be a whole bunch of half-finished software stacks for it, rather than ome complete one. The next one, which was definitely going to be the real future of Openmoko, was always a few months away, and as soon as it got close you'd find out the team had ditched the framework and were already working on the next next one. As a result, as someone who had wanted to jump in and start experimenting with writing application code, there wasn't really a platform to do that on. So after a few months of frustratingly dropped calls, or silent calls and unsent text messages, I went out and bought a small, shiny feature phone and didn't look at another smartphone until the nokia N900 showed up.

digi_owl 9y ago
That seems to be an ongoing problem with FOSS. Because nobody is there to crack whips about quality targets etc, devs keep wondering off path as they run out of shiny features to implement, or find themselves going "I could do X if only...", and thus a new codebase is birthed...
- majewsky 9y ago
  Or rather, it makes you wonder if the devs ever used the software themselves. In my experience, above all else, dogfooding is what gets software into a productive state.
- Nursie 9y ago
  The major problem in this case (IMHO) was that there was someone to crack the whip, and they didn't do it! The project was run by a company who had employees and at least one manager, but nobody was setting a direction for those employees to move in, and making the hard decisions (like "no, we're sticking with this stack to get something stable and production ready, even if it is flawed").

btcnnewsdaily 9y ago

I remember these, definitely had it's unique features about them at the time.

toyg 9y ago

I'm genuinely surprised to find out, in this thread, that so many people actually bought an Openmoko device. I only remember it being a perennial work-in-progress, and when they eventually started actually selling something, it was so painfully obsolete that I couldn't get myself to consider it (unlike the N900).

cesarb 9y ago
It's sampling bias: the sort of people who would buy an Openmoko device even before it has working software are also the sort of people who would browse HN regularly.
- wink 9y ago
  Or even more so, comment on this thread. I wasn't going to, because I didn't have one - but one of my coworkers at the time had one, and we absolutely made fun of him that he had to first get a new kernel to be able to either send a text message or make a call (don't remember which of the two, the other one didn't work at all).