g...@unixarea.de wrote: > I'm using since 2008 the FR as my one and only cellphone. This is not > lying, it is just a fact. And I do not know any other person from this > list who is doing so.
Nick <openmoko-commun...@njw.me.uk> followed: > I am too. The only thing that makes me tempted to switch phones is=20 > redphone or chatsecure, basically. The GTA02 sucks, in some ways,=20 > but I have no plans to buy a less free phone than it, so I'll stay=20 > where I am for now. I am very glad to see a couple of people using their Freerunners and not switching to anything less free. But I just can't help but wonder: are you using your FR because it's free or because it's a smartphone? In other words, if there were a phone just as free as the FR, i.e., full source code for everything (including the GSM radio interface) without any binary blobs, full hardware schematics, free bootloader w/o any locks etc, but a dumbphone instead of a smartphone - a small, non-touch-sensitive LCD, a traditional numeric button pad for dialing and T9 texting, a processor with just enough horsepower to make/receive calls and send/receive SMS and not one iota more, and an OS-less firmware architecture optimized specifically for those functions - would you wish to use such a phone? What I find almost tragic about the history of this community is that someone effectively "jumped the gun" on evolution: produced a free smartphone (Openmoko) without producing a free dumbphone first. Some of us are life-long dumbphone users, but are very unhappy about the fact that all existing dumbphones are 100% closed and proprietary, with no ability for an end user to fix functional bugs herself or to make her own changes to the user interface code in the firmware. I currently use my Freerunner as a development platform and nothing more: I use its modem block as a BUV (bring-up vehicle) to run my experimental FreeCalypso firmware before porting the latter to dumbphone hardware targets. But I don't use it as my personal phone with an end user hat on. I don't do the latter because I have too much intrinsic personal revulsion against the idea of using an entire second processor running a full-blown GNU/Linux OS just to make a phone call - when I know full well that this functionality has been very successfully implemented on a tiny ARM7TDMI processor @ 52 MHz with a total of 4 MiB of flash, 256 KiB of fast SRAM and 512 KiB of slow SRAM (specific numbers from Mot C139) running a real-time firmware environment without any full-blown OS. So I wonder how other Freerunner users feel about this issue: do you actually *like* the fact that it is a smartphone, or would you rather use a dumbphone, but are using the FR and tolerating its smart aspects because no free dumbphone currently exists? VLR, SF _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community