Bill McGonigle <b...@bfccomputing.com> writes: > > Still, all kinds of providers go through leadership changes and ousters > all the time - this one is being done open-source style. That seems to > have some media people freaked out.
The whole `open-ness' idea still seems to be `new and unsettling' to a lot of people; even people who are accustomed to open development in software still get freaked-out when the open methodology is applied in areas other than straight-up software development. Openmoko, for example, has repeatedly had issues with the open development model that they've used for their smartphone/palmtop/whatever hardware and software: a bunch of things that were more like `team status meetings', `team morale-raising sessions', etc. were all mis-taken as being `press releases' and `marketing promises'. When the `expected release-dates' slipped, the onlookers cried doom because the company had `failed to deliver on its promises'; when the `mass production' version of the hardware became available without readty-to-go, everyman-UI smartphone /software/ preloaded, a lot of people called foul on that. A `review' video appeared on Vimeo, called "OpenMoko Train Wreck", where the `reviewer' said things like "the software is so rough that I'm surprised that they're charging this much for the hardware" (what?), "I know the bezel's there to keep the screen from getting scratched, because they couldn't afford a glass screen..." (what?), and ultimately concluding that it (paraphrased) `doesn't stand up to the iPhone, and anyone who tells you otherwise is playing a cruel joke on you'. But /of course/ the software wasn't going to be finished until after the hardware became available, and /of course/ the addresses to the engineering-teams were optimistic. There's actually been nothing damning, or even unusual, in their development-process--except that the things that are usually hidden away in the corporate bowels have been happening out in the open, and the `engineering teams' have been distributed throughout the same general-admission seating as the end users and the press (so a challenge being faced is to communicate with one segment of the audience without having the rest of the audience hear it--I guess that's called... "politics"?). One of their more notable communication-failures was when Sean Moss-Pultz announced that a speculative project in an early planning stage was being cancelled, and the news-articles that resulted from that bore headlines like "opensource phone company goes out of business". People keep comparing the Openmoko project(s) to the iPhone, also--quite unfavourably. Mainly, I think, it's just because the iPhone `appeared fully-formed' where everyone's been able to watch all of the Openmoko developments happening out in the open. But if you look at the events that were hidden inside Apple leading up to the iPhone's release (and the start-to-finish timeline), the pace of Openmoko's progress is actually pretty impressive; even moreso if you consider other factors like the relative amounts of funding that they had, and the final prices (without carrier subsidies) of the different products. And /of course/ the Openmoko devices don't compare to the iPhone--it's (forgive me) Apples to oranges; The iPhone doesn't compare very well if what you want is a FreeRunner, either ;) So, yeah--the world at large is seemingly still, ever so slowly, coming to grips with the notion of `transparency'. -- Don't be afraid to ask (Lf.((Lx.xx) (Lr.f(rr)))). _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
