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.
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...
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").
Or rather, it makes you wonder if the devs ever used the software themselves. In my experience, above all else, dogfooding is what gets software into a productive state.
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.