
OpenMoko: 10 Years After - Kostic
http://www.vanille.de/openmoko-10-years-after-mickeys-story/
======
paulborza
I was one of the Google Summer of Code "interns" for OpenMoko back in 2008. I
was so excited to get the free OpenMoko device and actually implemented
gesture recognition and screen orientation for the device part of the GSoC
project. Here's a video of it
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2S2rQUETwc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2S2rQUETwc)

But let me tell you about the device:

1\. You couldn't even make a phone call with it. There was a hardware bug that
stopped it from making phone calls. It was basically a PDA...

2\. If the battery ever ran out, you couldn't start the phone anymore. You had
to have a spare Nokia phone that you'd use to charge that battery. Thank god
they were using Nokia-compatible batteries. The gist was, never ever to let
the phone's battery reach 0%.

3\. The development of any UX components was cumbersome. They always insisted
in supporting GTK and another platform which I forgot its name. They were such
a small team and yet they were building two projects which essentially were
doing the same thing. Why?!

Those three were just a few problems. The Freerunner was definitely not a
user-friendly phone.

~~~
narag
Somewhat related: I was a little interested in Firefox OS. When I tried to get
a device I found that I should either be in a wait list for months, buy a
"more or less compatible" phone (it might work or it might not) or get a ZTE
(brand that I hadn't heard of until then) with lackluster features at a
premium price, compared to a regular Samsung.

Being an early adopter is not for everyone, for sure. But being the only
adopter is definitely a PITA :)

------
wwweston
Doesn't close on a bright note:

>However, the sad truth is that it looks like there is no business case
anymore for a truly open platform based on custom-designed hardware, since
people refuse to spend extra money for tweakability, freedom, and security.
Despite us living in times where privacy is massively endangered. If anyone
out there thinks different and plans a project, please holler and get me on
board!

~~~
digi_owl
I think it may be a bit premature.

Just look at what people are doing with RPis and various radio boards.

There was one such project posted on HN recently that had a RPi Zero W hooked
up to a touch screen and a mobile radio. All battery powered.

In a sense the Openmoko was too early and too bespoke. Thus driving the cost
of entry for would be tinkerers through the roof.

~~~
potatolicious
I think it goes to the other poster's point: "You won't get users until you
have something that /does something/"

The RPi was ready to roll out of the gate - they had a working Linux distro
from the get-go that actually worked. They also provided really simple
instructions on how to get said Linux distro onto a SD card. You can boot the
RPi and have it be useful within a matter of minutes.

Openmoko simply never got near enough to working where the community felt like
picking it up and running with it.

I don't think Openmoko was premature - it was _incomplete_. You're not going
to get much participation from the community if doing anything useful on your
platform first involves fixing/finishing the platform.

~~~
dingo_bat
You're right. The rpi is feature complete for me. Everything works as
expected. I don't have to change any of the platform or OS code. I can simply
build on top. But I guess shipping a feature complete smartphone is much
harder.

------
eagsalazar2
This is a project I followed pretty closely at the time and I always felt it
was doomed. There were probably 100 reasons it failed that I wasn't aware of
but it seemed at the time like people really wanted the open software and
platform but OpenMoki got religious about hardware which no one really wanted
or cared about. Ultimately this was the route Android went and we see the
results.

It is classic for FOSS wonks (I am one!) to forget that most people don't care
about the principles of FOSS, they just care about the practical implications
of FOSS which aren't always the same thing.

~~~
wolfgke
I see a contradiction in your arguments:

> it seemed at the time like people really wanted the open software and
> platform

vs.

> It is classic for FOSS wonks (I am one!) to forget that most people don't
> care about the principles of FOSS

~~~
eagsalazar2
How is that a contradiction? My point is that open software has large and
immediate positive implications for end users but hardware does not.

~~~
wolfgke
If you really want an open software and platform (statement 1) you care about
the principles of FOSS (a contradiction to statement 2), since if you only
want some specific side benefits that FOSS provides, there exist "better"
(quotes because as an FOSS fan these are note better) options.

~~~
micahbright
No true Scotsman fallacy.

"If you really want an open source platform" is interpreted to mean different
things to different people. Open source may literally mean "open source"
without the associated zealous frothing at the mouth RMS association. No
contradiction here.

------
sargun
OpenMoko holds a special place in my heart. It was the first project that I
contributed to in any meaningful fashion. I wrote a couple patches to the
Python implementation of FSO. It taught me a ton about how GSM, embedded
devices, and power saving worked. I used it as an IoT device, long before IoT
was a common thing.

Not many people know this, but OpenMoko was largely rolled by Dash Navigation
--
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko#Dash_Express](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko#Dash_Express).
This gave Sean and Co. the cash and ability to develop the OpenMoko, but
unfortunately, Dash failed, because as a CNAV device, it was too little, too
late as compared to the ultra-converged cell phone. I wish that they would
have found other entities to back the project, but the market just wasn't
there yet.

------
throw7
I could be wrong, but my feeling at the time was there was a lack of
experience of a strong low-level hardware designer. I remember bug #1024...
all I really wanted to use my freerunner daily was making/receiving calls (you
know basic phone stuff), something flip phones at the time were absolutely
rock-solid at.

------
Nursie
I loved my freerunner but the article hit the nail on the head - there seemed
to be a whole bunch of half-finished software stacks for it, rather than ome
complete one.

The next one, which was definitely going to be the real future of Openmoko,
was always a few months away, and as soon as it got close you'd find out the
team had ditched the framework and were already working on the next next one.

As a result, as someone who had wanted to jump in and start experimenting with
writing application code, there wasn't really a platform to do that on. So
after a few months of frustratingly dropped calls, or silent calls and unsent
text messages, I went out and bought a small, shiny feature phone and didn't
look at another smartphone until the nokia N900 showed up.

~~~
digi_owl
That seems to be an ongoing problem with FOSS.

Because nobody is there to crack whips about quality targets etc, devs keep
wondering off path as they run out of shiny features to implement, or find
themselves going "I could do X if only...", and thus a new codebase is
birthed...

~~~
Nursie
The major problem in this case (IMHO) was that there was someone to crack the
whip, and they didn't do it!

The project was run by a company who had employees and at least one manager,
but nobody was setting a direction for those employees to move in, and making
the hard decisions (like "no, we're sticking with this stack to get something
stable and production ready, even if it is flawed").

------
mikepurvis
I'm grateful to OpenMoko every time I fire up dfu-util to flash something over
USB.

------
nickpsecurity
Has anyone tried to approach the Shenzhen companies doing quality knockoffs of
iPhones and Galaxies about doing a FOSS phone with OpenMoko features? I mean,
they clearly _can_ build one. Question is whether they would for a reasonable
amount of money.

~~~
kasbah
The problem is these would be gonkai phones (see link). Within the western
legal framework of "intellectual property" you can't open source what you
don't own. The impedance miss-match between the two working methodologies
makes any conversion a lot of work, e.g. the Fernvale effort to make a open
hardware _dumb_ phone platform:
[https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297](https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297)

------
scarhill
I also still have my Freerunner in a drawer somewhere. I bought the phone
early on and then ended up starting the android-on-freerunner project[1], when
Koolu, the company that had begun an Android port, abandoned the project. I
used the Cupcake version as a daily driver for quite a while, but it was never
anywhere near as stable as a "real" phone.

1 - [https://gitlab.com/android-on-freerunner/android-on-
freerunn...](https://gitlab.com/android-on-freerunner/android-on-
freerunner/wikis/home)

------
DanBC
Here's a small discussion from 10 years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14388](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14388)

------
phaedrus
I bought a Neo Freerunner when it came out. I tried make it my daily phone,
and invested a lot of time hacking on it - in the end a wasted effort. There
were show-stopper bugs and face-palm-worthy design missteps at every level of
the stack.

Its developer community was fragmented among a half-dozen different distros
from birth; Openmoko themselves _forked their own distro_ so that even if you
wanted to run the "official" one, you had two incompatible choices - and
neither the two "official" distros, nor any of the user-developed ones,
supported all of the hardware + apps necessary to actually use this thing as a
phone. (I.e. one might have audio but not support making calls; another might
support making calls but no audio volume; a third might lose all your
contacts, etc.) If we could have taken the union of features from all these
distros, it could have had a great smartphone OS; that just goes to show what
gratuitous fragmentation cost us.

As for hardware, we were screwed from both sides by the hardware companies
(flaky drivers) and Openmoko's own circuit design. Due to driver/card
incompatibility, I never found a high capacity SD card which would work
completely reliably in the phone; only the cramped 512MB SD card which came
with the phone worked reliably. Mind you most of the time the problem would
show up after you spent a few hours compiling & setting up Gentoo or whatever
on a new 8GB SD card only to have the 3rd boot fail with a corrupted card.

And in the circuit design side, from the specific problems the phone's board
had, I get the feeling Openmoko's engineers were computer engineers but not
very knowledgeable in audio electronics. They failed to properly separate and
route the audio ground, nor to give a good range of audio volumes, and
connections for the mixer chip were a mess. Actually, electrical noise was a
problem in other areas, as well; accessing the SD card generated noise or RF
leakage which would cause the GPS unit to lose it's lock. (So good luck
loading a map while navigating.) Interference in bandwidth (albeit just in
contention for buses, not actually noise) was also responsible for the
limitation of not being able to use the SD card and talk to the video
processor at full rate at the same time - so playing video from the card was
not workable, either.

I had some fun with the device, learned a little bit, and ultimately rebuilt
it into a larger case with a larger battery and an amplifier for the earpiece.
However, I would have been better served if I had done all these things on a
development board, rather than being tricked into buying a prototype
development board shaped like a phone. The experience led to me "missing the
boat" on getting into mobile development; it took a long time for me to get
another smartphone, because I had blown my money and my efforts on the
freerunner. For the next couple years whenever I would consider getting
another smartphone my then-wife (now ex) would counter "yeah that's what you
said when you wanted to buy the freerunner - and you have that _and you don 't
even use it_!"

~~~
vanous
Thank you for the summary, it perfectly pictures my experience too. I had
spent do much time and effort (did the audio cap fix, baseband update and few
more)... So much that even now phone calls with my brother (also freerunner
ex-user) still start with "do you have an echo".

I used freerunner for quite some time as secondary phone, developed an app or
two in python/enlightenment (efl), wrote much of the SHR wiki manual and ended
up not even considering Firefox phone or Ubuntu phone at all...

------
uberneo
I still remember how happy i was holding the first Opensource Linux phone in
my hands back in 2008 . It was fun to compile a basic c program using gcc . I
remember my first hack of my life #1024
[http://neofundas.blogspot.ie/2009/09/1024-hardware-
fixdeep-s...](http://neofundas.blogspot.ie/2009/09/1024-hardware-fixdeep-
sleep.html) Also remember when at 6.30 AM in morning you have to type "ps -ef
| grep -i alarm" , find the process id and then kill -9 id to stop the alarm
and that too using the stylus. Definitely these commands will make sure that
you will wake up 100% , a perfect alarm :)

------
Rjevski
As usual here's another victim of the free software problem - too much
emphasis on freedom and not enough on actual functionality.

I don't care how free your phone is, if it can't make phone calls I don't want
it, nor does anyone else.

------
rosser
I still have my Freerunner in a box somewhere. So much promise...

I keep wondering if there's something I could do with it. At this point,
though, it's probably more a historical footnote than anything.

------
k__
I remember 2007, when I started my bachelors degree some senior students had
one and were so proud.

Half a year later, nobody talked about it anymore and it was iPhone all the
way.

------
msla
Since the main page is a bit slow, here's a mirror:

[https://archive.is/8wYHe](https://archive.is/8wYHe)

------
toyg
I'm genuinely surprised to find out, in this thread, that _so many_ people
actually bought an Openmoko device. I only remember it being a perennial work-
in-progress, and when they eventually started actually selling something, it
was so painfully obsolete that I couldn't get myself to consider it (unlike
the N900).

~~~
cesarb
It's sampling bias: the sort of people who would buy an Openmoko device even
before it has working software are also the sort of people who would browse HN
regularly.

~~~
wink
Or even more so, comment on this thread.

I wasn't going to, because I didn't have one - but one of my coworkers at the
time had one, and we absolutely made fun of him that he had to first get a new
kernel to be able to either send a text message or make a call (don't remember
which of the two, the other one didn't work at all).

------
lamby
Ah, nostalgia. I remember attending a big OpenMoko announcement as FOSDEM.
Naturally, it being FOSDEM, it was allocated a tiny room which was completely
and utterly packed. _g_

------
acidtrucks
I've always wanted to run openmoko. If I could run it on modern phones and
replace android, I totally would.

------
feborges
I remember John "Maddog" Hall speaking about it in Brazil. I was just a kid at
the time.

~~~
mattl
Yeah, Maddog had something he was running that was supporting them with
Android.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koolu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koolu)

------
btcnnewsdaily
I remember these, definitely had it's unique features about them at the time.

------
odammit
I bought one of these way back when. It was the model with the hole in it for
hooking to a lanyard or something else absurd...

It was so dumb and jittery I microwaved it a little and then swatted it off my
roof with a tennis racket.

Was fun, would destroy again 10/10

