One-week trip to Taipeh, visiting FIC.

On rather short notice I am now on my way to Taipeh, Taiwan. As the interested reader of this journal will have noticed, OpenMoko and the Neo1973 are the seemingly endless story of delays and mishaps throughout the last nine months.

So the purpose of this trip is to discuss various options on how to make sure that we all learn the neccessary lessons out of this past experience, and ensure that OpenMoko eventually can at least keep up to some of its schedule promises.

So this will be a week full of meetings and discussions mostly with various managers and particularly the hardware team at FIC, our generous sponsor.

What is at least equally exciting are the planned meetings with various WiFi chipset vendors to discuss our requirements of a mobile-phone compatible low-size, low-power WiFi chipset with a fully GPL licensed Linux kernel driver.

The downside of all this is that I'm once again held back from writing some of the most important infrastructure code that OpenMoko still needs. Anyway, this compromise has to be made - after all, of what use is software without a high-quality, reliable, performant and available handset hardware :)

Since Werner doesn't have a blog, old-fashioned as he is, let me mention that he'll be there for the whole week, too. I think it's a 34-hour trip for him to get from Buenos Aires to Taipeh. I wonder how well he'll survive that...