ezuall wrote: > Potential, that is the first word that comes to mind when I think about and > play with my freerunner. I spent months absolutely obsessively waiting for > the release, but when I first received it I was afraid.
I agree, there's unlimited potential. To be honest, I was all hyped about the Freerunner, even throughout the beta testing period before they became available for purchase, and gladly took the risk of making a purchase for the Los Angeles group buy. I should admit though, that despite my zeal, I'm still quite confused myself on the whole ASU/FSO/Qtopia/2007.2 framework splits, as Jay Vaughan has pointed out a few times. To some degree, Sean's Email helped ease my confusion -- I see Openmoko like Linux Torvalds (which Michele brought up) -- Openmoko has an idea of where they want to get the phone to a basic "usable" state and to where we community hacker/members can start adding on top of it and making the device a household name. Openmoko has their tool of choice, but don't care what other people develop for the phone, I'm sure the same way Linux Torvalds probably doesn't care whether an end user utilizes GNOME vs KDE. And while Openmoko is working on their own framework, I have to agree with many other voices: knowing which platform to develop for, as a developer myself, is confusing. I don't like the thought of having to write multiple versions of an application that caters to GTK and Qt separately, although I recall that the FSO framework is trying to bridge that gap. But I also don't want to have to market my application as "only works on 2007.2/FSO because I use GTK" because that's the route I chose to build my app. I guess I personally envisioned the Neo1973 (GTA01) as the base model for developers and that the Freerunner was going to have a smoother transition into the mainstream. I agree with Sean (and several others) that the Freerunner gets them a step closer, but Openmoko still relies heavily on the feedback (and *participation*) of the community. As far as "design" goes, I understood Sean's Email to say that they don't care how we build what we build on the phone, and that even the design of the phone (ie: case) is open to us on all levels to make it whatever we want it to be. They're going to focus on their own framework and hardware issues, and let us do what we do best as a community. I still hold to a quote from Andy Powell on the community list, which emphasizes that we all need to pitch in where we can. I agree, not all of us have super-godlike programming skillz, and not all of us are fluent in several languages to write the wiki, but we can ALL chip in here and there if we're on the same page: "If everyone put as much effort into development as they do into bitching and whining this phone would be able to cure cancer by now." - Andy Powell, May 6, 2008 Personally, I signed up to help manage the wiki to make it a better source of information. I haven't got the time to invest into kernel-level development or any hard-core programming, but I *do* have time to review a wiki page or two every single day, and will do what I can. If everybody had the same level of cooperation, this project would be radically different. At the same time, there are always going to be groups of people who are more likely to be vocal than helpful, that's why someone coined the phrase about how "10% of the people do 90% of the work". We will *always* have to deal with the same questions on the mailing list over and over and have to watch for, and manage, duplicate content on the wiki because someone doesn't know how to use a search function. That's a given. Instead of being harsh on these people and speaking negatively, here's a thought: be helpful. We're only going to alienate people if we tell people their thoughts are nonsense/worthless and "RTFM n00b". I feel that Sean has just given us (or perhaps just reiterated what should have already been known), as a community, the means to empower ourselves to help on *everything* about the Openmoko project as a whole. We wanted an open platform, and it's been given to us. We're *all* part of that design. Just my $0.02... -id _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community