Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

Exactly 10 years ago, on July 9th, 2007 we started to sell+ship the first Openmoko Neo1973. To be more precise, the webshop actually opened a few hours early, depending on your time zone. Sean announced the availability in this mailing list post

I don't really have to add much to my ten years [of starting to work on] Openmoko anniversary blog post a year ago, but still thought it's worth while to point out the tenth anniversary.

It was exciting times, and there was a lot of pioneering spirit: Building a Linux based smartphone with a 100% FOSS software stack on the application processor, including all drivers, userland, applications - at a time before Android was known or announced. As history shows, we'd been working in parallel with Apple on the iPhone, and Google on Android. Of course there's little chance that a small taiwanese company can compete with the endless resources of the big industry giants, and the many Neo1973 delays meant we had missed the window of opportunity to be the first on the market.

It's sad that Openmoko (or similar projects) have not survived even as a special-interest project for FOSS enthusiasts. Today, virtually all options of smartphones are encumbered with way more proprietary blobs than we could ever imagine back then.

In any case, the tenth anniversary of trying to change the amount of Free Softwware in the smartphone world is worth some celebration. I'm reaching out to old friends and colleagues, and I guess we'll have somewhat of a celebration party both in Germany and in Taiwan (where I'll be for my holidays from mid-September to mid-October).