Informing recipients of free OpenMoko developer phones
Today [depending on the timezone maybe even yesterday], we started to inform
those developers whom we have selected for the 'Phase 0', i.e. those who will
receive a Neo1973 free of cost (including shipping). Those phones are scheduled
to leave Taiwan on Feb. 11.
So this heads-up mail two weeks in advance is mainly to obtain shipping
address, and ask whether there are any special customs related issues that need
to be taken care of.
Yes, it is somewhat elitist to hand-pick people and then send them free
hardware. But I don't really see a viable alternative approach for a start.
Those recipients are people who are really known to contribute to the FOSS
world, and of whom we think they would really like to contribute to this project.
Now some FOSS critics (or people critical of businesses engaging with FOSS)
might say: Yeah, now you think the rest of your phone is developed for free.
This is completely wrong.
This project is ran by people who believe in Free Software. It is from the
community for the community. It is an important chance for Free Software and
user freedom in this otherwise completely controlled mobile phone market.
Basically we have a hardware vendor (FIC) providing us with phone hardware, for
which they
- fund to hire selected developers within the community
- provide complete hardware documentation and hardware support, even the ability to feed back hardware wish list items
- give us complete freedom where we want to take this project
Now you might still think: "In the end, they will make the profit". This is
only true to a certain degree. First of all, everything we develop is Free
software. Everything but the hardware specific bits could easily be run on any
other piece of hardware. So anyone who wants to either contribute code or hire
capable developers could theoretically port the whole thing on different
hardware.
Also, while we ourselves think that this product will rock, this is really a
nice market. It's interesting for geeks, hackers and certain power users. Not
unlike OpenWRT in the field of wireless routers - but with active support by the
hardware manufacturer.
So I personally cannot believe any of those "they just want to get development
for free" arguments and want to strongly encourage the interested community to
join this effort and help us make Free Software a viable alternative in the
mobile phone market.
An OpenMoko update
As the interested reader might have noticed, a couple of days ago, the OpenMoko project has
officially announced a schedule for the upcoming months.
Behind the scenes, everybody is giving his best to be able to fulfill that
schedule. Anybody who has been involved in a project of this size inevitably
knows that there are many problems and bugs to be resolved.
Today, for example, I was happy to be able to play back MP3 (and politically
correct: Ogg/Vorbis) files for the first time on the Neo1973 phone. Those
speakers can really scream loud, I can tell you!
In my part of the project, the boot loader / kernel area, there are also many
bugs to be fixed. The bugzilla indicates 11 blocker bugs and five major bugs
in that key area of the project that need to be resolved. The quantity might
seem low, but some of them are quite generic, such as some important mechanism
not working yet.
By now, we've also come up with a quite complete list of names for the 'phase 0',
i.e. those guys whom we will ship a free Neo1973 device on February 11
(actually 12, since 11th is a Sunday. Hey, we're working on Sundays, only the
shipping company isn't *g*).
Oh, and yes. The planet.openmoko.org is finally public.
Even though there's not a lot of activity yet, expect way more in the next
weeks, especially after mid-february, when we've put 50 phones into the wild :)
Getting back into netfilter/iptables work
I've been gone for long enough. Even though neither my RFID projects nor
OpenMoko are anywhere close to be finished, I'm determined to get back into
netfilter work again.
Started to catch up with mailing lists. There has been amazing progress, most notably
the implementation of NAT for nf_conntrack, which finally should get us rid of the old
ip_conntrack code in one of the upcoming kernel releases. No more support of
two versions in parallel. And the ability to do IPv4 NAT and IPv6 connection tracking
on the same machine. Isn't that all that we wanted? Not quite...
So for now, I'm participating in the discussions again, and I'm now also working on
getting IPv6 interpreter plug-ins into ulogd2. The nfnetlink_log mechanism can happily
send IPv6 packets to user space, it's just that ulogd2 doesn't yet know what to
do with them. That needs to be changed.
No time to blog
Just a short ping, I have been way too busy to do even the most important
things of life, let aside writing blog entries.
I am not going to write about progress of any projects, because I absolutely
don't even feel like talking about my work anymore. The workload is just too
high, with no real end in sight. Things keep falling apart as fast as they
come together...
