4 ms·

EFF Kicks Off Campaign to Free Your Phone

22 points by lnguyen 18y ago

lallysingh 18y ago
So.. does this mean any promotion to get people to help on the OpenMoko project? Or are we going to silently pretend that it didn't happen -- like a mistake that the polite don't mention?
- SingAlong 18y ago
  Just a couple of years back, I really wanted to take a break from my web development stuff and buy an OpenMoko phone to develop something on it (and I couldn't afford one of my own). I thought it would really be cool to own one and mod it, and feel it would be cool even today. I hope they start giving student discounts or atleast release an SDK that would help develop for OpenMoko without the actual hardware. Anyway, the FreeYourPhone campaign has some sense in it. But they could have instead gone the other way and brought together mobile platform developers and form a standard so that an app would work on every phone (yeah I know java does, but not an "everybody supports" standard). Atleast the core can be same. Something like linux. This way every app developer would be spending less time developing an app (since there would be much less porting job to be done) and have a larger reach. This also works for the customers since they would have a much larger app catalog to buy from. Right now, all I can imagine is that if something like that happens then we would find people selling apps like how vegetables and clothes are sold now. Free-form retailership (anyone can sell apps). You could be competing with your friend if both you and your friend have your app stores. That would open up a new business opportunity. And very very good for small time app developers. Piracy is a problem, but maybe making the app a "shame-ware" can poke the user to pay if he likes it. (ref: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=400527 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=400527) I'm just out of words to explain such an exciting and competitive situation, so I'll leave the rest to your imagination.
  - nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
    > I hope they ... release an SDK that would help develop for OpenMoko without the actual hardware. You don't need an SDK; any Linux machine with GTK+, Qt4, or ETK/EFL toolkits can be your SDK. There ace already Openmoko "emulators" available using qemu to simulate the hardware, although you don't really need that since you just need to develop the app on your Linux box for a 640x480 tall-or-wide screen, and then either set up an ARMv4 cross-compile toolchain using GCC, or get someone with a Neo to compile the app on the Neo itself. "Easy as pie."
  - pavlov 18y ago
    As an alternative to OpenMoko, Nokia's Maemo (http://www.maemo.org http://www.maemo.org) is also a fairly standard Linux platform based on GTK+ and Hildon. Nokia also owns Qt nowadays, so it will be integrated in Maemo eventually. I rather like Maemo. The first versions that shipped on the N770 and N800 tablets were shaky, but they've made a lot of progress -- IMO it's finally delivering on the promise of a user-friendly Internet-oriented pocketable UI on top of Linux. Graphics performance has been a weak point of the platform, which is a shame considering that the displays on the Nokia tablets have been very good. But the upcoming version 5 of Maemo will finally enable 3D graphics acceleration on TI's OMAP3 platform (same CPU+GPU platform as used in the Palm Pre). Maemo 5 includes the Clutter API for building accelerated UIs. (Maemo 5 will also include 3G mobile phone connectivity support, so it will effectively become a phone OS... I wouldn't have bothered to bring it up in this context otherwise :)) > Right now, all I can imagine is that if something like that happens then we would find people selling apps like how vegetables and clothes are sold now. Free-form retailership (anyone can sell apps). You could be competing with your friend if both you and your friend have your app stores. Funny -- this is exactly how Java mobile phone games have been sold in my country (and presumably most of Europe) since about 2003. Purchases are initiated by SMS and delivered as over-the-air downloads, so starting up a "mobile game store" is as easy as getting an SMS short number and hooking up the content delivery system. Most of these companies also sell other mobile content as well -- ringtones, background images, clip art for picture messaging, and so on. At least a couple of years ago, they were doing pretty good business, and the content stores were running lots of ads in both traditional and online media. (The newspaper ads were basically filled to the brim with little previews of the "hottest" graphics, games and songs available; each content item had a code for ordering by SMS.) I don't see those ads as much anymore though, so maybe the novelty of mobile phone content downloads has dried up... Or maybe they're now advertising more directly to the teenagers who actually buy this stuff. Still, I definitely prefer this kind of fully open distribution to the "walled garden" approach of on-device app stores that seems to be all the rage in America now. (Why should the hardware vendor become the dictator of content distribution? I don't see the benefits.)
    - SingAlong 18y ago
      LOL! just sometime after I posted I got another crazy idea, but by the time the edit link had disappeared. K. la, here's it: how abt setting up mobile content booths? Like a phone booth. You could keep them at the exits of the shopping malls or huge stores or public places. These would offer data cables / connection via bluetooth to browse and download stuff including songs, games, etc. You download, the currency is deducted from you prepaid balance or added to you bills and you just walk. Yeah we all know this can be done thru the normal sms-advertise-download-pay or via an appstore wa etcy instead of physical booths. But when I see a booth, I also remember I wanna download stuff and do it (something like I used to remember to send a post to someone after looking at the red mailbox). Going old fashioned sometimes is cool.
- pavlov 18y ago
  While it would be nice to have a fully open-source software stack on a phone, the EFF is campaigning for much more basic freedoms for American cell phone users. In most places in the world, it's possible and very commonplace to buy a mobile phone separately from the network operator. The operator's only physical product is the SIM card, and consumers understand this. Even if you purchase a phone that's subsidised by the operator (which typically means making a fixed-rate contract for 24 months, so you end up repaying for the phone in full and you can't switch to another company with better rates), the operator has no control over the applications you install on the phone. In the US, the operators apparently sell almost all phones through their own channels, which gives these companies the unusual power of being able to dictate the software that goes on the devices. Thus they can introduce locks and limitations into the software, and thanks to the DMCA, removing those limitations can be illegal. I'm not American (and thus my understanding of the situation may be limited), but to me this seems to be a case where bad legislation has given a cartel of corporations excessive power over consumers. (It's somehow perverse that gigantic former European telemonopolies like Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom are more open and competitive than their American equivalents, even though the former were essentially state-owned bureaucracies until the 1990s.) Hopefully the DMCA exemption will persist, at least.

22 points by lnguyen 18y ago

So.. does this mean any promotion to get people to help on the OpenMoko project? Or are we going to silently pretend that it didn't happen -- like a mistake that the polite don't mention?

SingAlong 18y ago
Just a couple of years back, I really wanted to take a break from my web development stuff and buy an OpenMoko phone to develop something on it (and I couldn't afford one of my own). I thought it would really be cool to own one and mod it, and feel it would be cool even today. I hope they start giving student discounts or atleast release an SDK that would help develop for OpenMoko without the actual hardware. Anyway, the FreeYourPhone campaign has some sense in it. But they could have instead gone the other way and brought together mobile platform developers and form a standard so that an app would work on every phone (yeah I know java does, but not an "everybody supports" standard). Atleast the core can be same. Something like linux. This way every app developer would be spending less time developing an app (since there would be much less porting job to be done) and have a larger reach. This also works for the customers since they would have a much larger app catalog to buy from. Right now, all I can imagine is that if something like that happens then we would find people selling apps like how vegetables and clothes are sold now. Free-form retailership (anyone can sell apps). You could be competing with your friend if both you and your friend have your app stores. That would open up a new business opportunity. And very very good for small time app developers. Piracy is a problem, but maybe making the app a "shame-ware" can poke the user to pay if he likes it. (ref: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=400527 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=400527) I'm just out of words to explain such an exciting and competitive situation, so I'll leave the rest to your imagination.
- nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
  > I hope they ... release an SDK that would help develop for OpenMoko without the actual hardware. You don't need an SDK; any Linux machine with GTK+, Qt4, or ETK/EFL toolkits can be your SDK. There ace already Openmoko "emulators" available using qemu to simulate the hardware, although you don't really need that since you just need to develop the app on your Linux box for a 640x480 tall-or-wide screen, and then either set up an ARMv4 cross-compile toolchain using GCC, or get someone with a Neo to compile the app on the Neo itself. "Easy as pie."
- pavlov 18y ago
  As an alternative to OpenMoko, Nokia's Maemo (http://www.maemo.org http://www.maemo.org) is also a fairly standard Linux platform based on GTK+ and Hildon. Nokia also owns Qt nowadays, so it will be integrated in Maemo eventually. I rather like Maemo. The first versions that shipped on the N770 and N800 tablets were shaky, but they've made a lot of progress -- IMO it's finally delivering on the promise of a user-friendly Internet-oriented pocketable UI on top of Linux. Graphics performance has been a weak point of the platform, which is a shame considering that the displays on the Nokia tablets have been very good. But the upcoming version 5 of Maemo will finally enable 3D graphics acceleration on TI's OMAP3 platform (same CPU+GPU platform as used in the Palm Pre). Maemo 5 includes the Clutter API for building accelerated UIs. (Maemo 5 will also include 3G mobile phone connectivity support, so it will effectively become a phone OS... I wouldn't have bothered to bring it up in this context otherwise :)) > Right now, all I can imagine is that if something like that happens then we would find people selling apps like how vegetables and clothes are sold now. Free-form retailership (anyone can sell apps). You could be competing with your friend if both you and your friend have your app stores. Funny -- this is exactly how Java mobile phone games have been sold in my country (and presumably most of Europe) since about 2003. Purchases are initiated by SMS and delivered as over-the-air downloads, so starting up a "mobile game store" is as easy as getting an SMS short number and hooking up the content delivery system. Most of these companies also sell other mobile content as well -- ringtones, background images, clip art for picture messaging, and so on. At least a couple of years ago, they were doing pretty good business, and the content stores were running lots of ads in both traditional and online media. (The newspaper ads were basically filled to the brim with little previews of the "hottest" graphics, games and songs available; each content item had a code for ordering by SMS.) I don't see those ads as much anymore though, so maybe the novelty of mobile phone content downloads has dried up... Or maybe they're now advertising more directly to the teenagers who actually buy this stuff. Still, I definitely prefer this kind of fully open distribution to the "walled garden" approach of on-device app stores that seems to be all the rage in America now. (Why should the hardware vendor become the dictator of content distribution? I don't see the benefits.)
  - SingAlong 18y ago
    LOL! just sometime after I posted I got another crazy idea, but by the time the edit link had disappeared. K. la, here's it: how abt setting up mobile content booths? Like a phone booth. You could keep them at the exits of the shopping malls or huge stores or public places. These would offer data cables / connection via bluetooth to browse and download stuff including songs, games, etc. You download, the currency is deducted from you prepaid balance or added to you bills and you just walk. Yeah we all know this can be done thru the normal sms-advertise-download-pay or via an appstore wa etcy instead of physical booths. But when I see a booth, I also remember I wanna download stuff and do it (something like I used to remember to send a post to someone after looking at the red mailbox). Going old fashioned sometimes is cool.
pavlov 18y ago
While it would be nice to have a fully open-source software stack on a phone, the EFF is campaigning for much more basic freedoms for American cell phone users. In most places in the world, it's possible and very commonplace to buy a mobile phone separately from the network operator. The operator's only physical product is the SIM card, and consumers understand this. Even if you purchase a phone that's subsidised by the operator (which typically means making a fixed-rate contract for 24 months, so you end up repaying for the phone in full and you can't switch to another company with better rates), the operator has no control over the applications you install on the phone. In the US, the operators apparently sell almost all phones through their own channels, which gives these companies the unusual power of being able to dictate the software that goes on the devices. Thus they can introduce locks and limitations into the software, and thanks to the DMCA, removing those limitations can be illegal. I'm not American (and thus my understanding of the situation may be limited), but to me this seems to be a case where bad legislation has given a cartel of corporations excessive power over consumers. (It's somehow perverse that gigantic former European telemonopolies like Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom are more open and competitive than their American equivalents, even though the former were essentially state-owned bureaucracies until the 1990s.) Hopefully the DMCA exemption will persist, at least.