Disappointing news
I’m in Berlin at LinuxTag and was very excited to hear updates on both OpenMoko and the OpenEZX projects. OpenMoko is a project that aims at providing a complete open source phone (including open source friendly hardware), while OpenEZX aims to free the existing Motorola EZX phones like the A780 or the A1200/Ming by providing completely open source software stacks for these phones.
But in all honesty, the talks were both rather disappointing. OpenMoko is way behind schedule for their updates and still isn’t able to provide reliable phone functionality. Lots of cool stuff you can do with the device - but it simply isn’t a phone.
And OpenEZX in a way is even worse. If I try to summarize progress since last year all I can say is “marginal”. It still can’t run most of the hardware including the GSM/EDGE radio in the A1200. It basically can boot a 2.6 Linux kernel and not much more. And here as well there is no phone functionality in sight.
Oh well.
Thanks for visiting!
I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?
What else do you want..? A real substitution for the privative brand-original software? What else… seriously… Those are open source minded projects which are intended to be a real alternative. Mission impossible, considering that those others ones have thousands fully qualified, fully paid programmers working on that. Just compare.
Glad to hear of yours again.
[...] The topic was Moblin - or more specifically, the Moblin.org open source project and our goal to get a larger and larger open source developer community together that will drive the direction of the open source software stack used on internet focused devices. Lots of “open source” in that last sentence. And that’s intentional. There are many projects that try to create open source or Linux based stacks for mobile devices. But none of them have really convinced me that they are truly open source. Openmoko may be an exception - but as I wrote a couple of months ago progress there has been slow. [...]
[...] The topic was Moblin - or more specifically, the Moblin.org open source project and our goal to get a larger and larger open source developer community together that will drive the direction of the open source software stack used on internet focused devices. Lots of “open source” in that last sentence. And that’s intentional. There are many projects that try to create open source or Linux based stacks for mobile devices. But none of them have really convinced me that they are truly open source. Openmoko may be an exception - but as I wrote a couple of months ago progress there has been slow. [...]