openm...@pulster.de (Christoph Pulster) wrote: > I remember adverts of Openmoko in capitals "100% FREE mobile". > that this was a false promise comes evident afterwards.
I wonder how many people forked over their $$$ for those expensive Openmoko phones primarily in the hope that the bloody NDA would get broken by someone in a year or two, and were utterly disappointed when that didn't happen. I am convinced that the number is quite large, and the only thing that made me stand out is that I *voiced* this sentiment openly, without beating around the bush. I am also convinced that the *real* reason why "Openmoko = failure" in the general public's perception is precisely because of that NDA and no one having broken it during the years when it mattered the most. The Freerunner became truly free only on 2013-10-13, some 5y (or is it 6y?) after its introduction and 4y after cessation of production, at exactly 04:08:54 CEST, the date of this announcement: http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2013-October/069010.html Prior to that announcement, i.e., at 04:08:53 CEST and for the 6y of Om community history prior to that, the Unfree-runner was a proprietary phone no different from anything out of Motorola, Samsung or Apple. But I'm afraid that the liberation came a little too late: I keep hearing the number "15k units made and sold" being tossed around, but of those 15k units, after we subtract those which were cannibalized for plastic parts to stuff nasty Qualcomm modems into and those which got repurposed for some non-telephony uses, I suspect that the remaining ones are probably buried some place deep, forgotten by their owners who gave up on them when a few years passed after Om's disbanding, and yet no free GSM firmware emerged. Oh, and to add a little feminine perspective on the matter, when I told the Openmoko story ("100% FREE mobile phone! - oh, oops, no, not the cellphone part") to my lady, her reaction was "it would be like me saying I am only half-pregnant!" I would argue that Om's biggest mistake, the one that led to their downfall, was the silly "half-pregnant" attempt to do it legally. It should have been done as a 100% explicitly-illegal black market operation instead. Hiring law-abiding Germans to run the show was the #1 mistake - the operation should have been run by the Chinese/Taiwanese instead. Contrary to what has been said, they did NOT "have" to sign the NDAs as they did - surely if the show were run by Chinese/Taiwanese without a single German on staff, they could have simply used the warez floating around that giant country. (As just one data point, the TSM30 source - *full source* - was published in 2004, at least 2y before Om came onto the scene.) The Calypso etc chips are easily sourceable on the grey market: some "legit" company buys 100k chipsets from TI, makes 90k phones, the remaining 10k chipsets sell on the grey market w/o unnecessary questions. The physical production of phones should have been done in some unmarked basement without any "legit" company attached, so there would be no one to sue, and the distribution (sales) should have been done through the same channels used to market and sell alternative medicine products like cocaine and heroin. But oh well, history is what it is. > the knowledge about NDA restrictions of GSM components is still today > only in some geek's mind. Huh? I'm afraid I don't follow what you are saying here. The GSM mini-Wikileaks collection at <ftp://ftp.ifctf.org/pub/GSM/> now has *everything* related to Calypso and other related chipsets from TI, probably more than Om ever had. The documentation for the actual hardware components has been on my FTP site since the fall of 2011 (downloaded from 52rd.com where it had been available to those who can navigate in Chinese for much longer), and we now have TI's TCS211 fw deliverable semi-src no different from the one Om had, if we make the reasonable assumption that all of TI's chipset customers got identical or near-identical fw starting point deliverables. We even have an equivalent TI deliverable (hw docs + fw semi-src) for their LoCosto chipset (one of Calypso's successors), and while I have no desire to use LoCosto instead of Calypso (LoCosto has some freedom- reducing "improvements"), the LoCosto semi-src is something like 95% real C source (unlike the TCS211/Calypso/Leonardo one on which the current leo2moko port is based), hence I plan on using chunks of code from the LoCosto source to replace some of the binary-only libs in the TCS211 version. So the liberation part of the FreeCalypso project is now 100% done; what remains now is the (quite hard) purely technical work of reintegrating all of the pieces back together to build the fw using gcc without any Weendoze tools or blobs. > As long as there are big players like government and companys, a 100% > open mobile will never happen. Never. Of course it will never happen legally, but so what? We can build it illegally instead. Building an explicitly-illegal phone (as in physical hardware) is the ultimate goal of the FreeCalypso project, and when I do build this hw, it will be sold only via online black market sites: BMR, new Silk Road, or whatever happens to be the preferred similar site du jour. Just imagine the convenience of having everything in one place: you put a totally free phone (one explicitly designed to be as illegal as possible, the joy of lawbreaking), some alternative medicines and an AK47 to defend yourself with in your shopping basket, then proceed to checkout. Of course only BTC accepted for payment, the official currency of black markets worldwide. Shipping to anywhere in the world, including all of the "bad" countries. Hasta la Victoria, Siempre! SF _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
