E-Dribble

Remember when I told you that the Openmoko phone was dead in the water?  Well, it seems that my informants at /. might have jumped the gun and now state that the phone is actually still being developed.  Hey, you can hardly blame me.  I just regurgitate all the crap that I find.

I understand that some of you may be under the mistaken assumption that I enjoy these FOSS failures, which would be untrue.  I’m the largest proponent of open source that you will find.  However, I don’t feel that you should get bonus points for developing open source apps if you’re incompetent.  From the complaints rolling in concerning the Openmoko platform, it’s indeed being handled by idiots.  Most complaints concern the fact that the devs concentrate on  bells and whistles while users can not actually successfully make a phone call on the phone.  During the development process it remained a fact that they couldn’t make a phone call, but the interface looks prettier than it did when they couldn’t make a phone call a year ago.

I bet you couldn’t guess that I’m blogging this from my OLPC while I call my publisher on my Neo Freerunner.

Hey, remember when I told you about the Openmoko phone?  The FOSS phone that was going to change the way carriers, providers and vendors treated the end user?

Well, you can now officially consider it another open source attempt that is being buried and forgotten.  I know, shocker.

Who would have thought that an open source endeavor such as this would have failed, what with the incredible success rate that these types of efforts enjoy?

I would be blogging this from my linux OLPC laptop, but, well, you know.

I’ve been watching this since I first heard about it last year on a linux forum.  It’s an open source phone/pim/pda/catchyphraseofthedayforphone.  There was a lot of speculation whether anything would come of it, but I thought they had a spectacular chance at making it, since they were avoiding the common pitfalls that other startups were falling into with little hesitation.

Well, Openmoko released the second gen phone to five distributors in France, Germany and India.  If you’re wondering why the US hasn’t seen it, it’s because they’re embracing the markets that show an open mind.  I-Sheep need not apply.

What does this mean?  Well, unless you’re a nerd, chances are great that you won’t notice the subtle changes.  Further, if you do notice them, you won’t care.  But for those of us paying attention, this provides an alternative to the developers that lock you into proprietary hardware, software and contracts.  Where Apple releases updates simply to squash hacks that their users have created to make the hardware work the way they want it to(i.e. for them), the open model hands all the necessary information over and asks that you share your work if you come up with something cool or useful.  It’s a community that not only allows you to make your hardware work for you, it helps.

Maybe Mr. Wozniak should pick one up.