>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!
If you want an open source project to work, it has to already work and then have easy places where people can start making changes. Otherwise, they don't know how much work is needed to get anything done, and don't want to risk weeks of work for minimal, if any, results.
> People only really contribute when they get something out of it. When someone is first beginning to contribute, they especially need to see some kind of payback, some kind of positive reinforcement, right away. For example, if someone were running a web browser, then stopped, added a simple new command to the source, recompiled, and had that same web browser plus their addition, they would be motivated to do this again, and possibly to tackle even larger projects.
> We never got there. We never distributed the source code to a working web browser, more importantly, to the web browser that people were actually using. We didn't release the source code to the most-previous-release of Netscape Navigator: instead, we released what we had at the time, which had a number of incomplete features, and lots and lots of bugs. And of course we weren't able to release any Java or crypto code at all.
> What we released was a large pile of interesting code, but it didn't much resemble something you could actually use.
"nomo zilla: resignation and postmortem". 1999. https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
To view this article, right click and choose "Open link in incognito window" or click https://anon.to/?https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
Maybe he's got a whitelist for some specific articles he allows HN to view.
Edit: never mind it's just my browser somehow stripping referer headers.
$ curl -IA "foo" https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
$ curl -IA "foo" --referer "news.ycombinator.com" https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://i.imgur.com/32R3qLv.png
Hardware is much harder to do, the more you screw it up.
Designs which don't work - i.e. basic power management - will cripple early-stage hardware development, and its one of the reasons hardware, is well .. hard.
OpenMoko didn't screw up, open-source-wise, no sir. I think you are mistaken in this claim.
Where they screwed up is not getting the hardware really nailed, such that it warranted actual production in the 10's of 1000's of units. It had to work, and you have to ship in the 5x'es before you gain any traction with a new hardware platform.
OpenMoko was many things (I still have 3) .. but it wasn't a failure of open source software. Without that stack, the thing wouldn't have even gotten off the ground. It didn't reach orbit, because of that 5x traction ..
> Is this really an "open source" thing?
Well, that the source be open to hack on is something that's pretty much a precondition to the situation where some random person finds themselves attempting to contribute to someone else's project. If you know of a way that's possible with anything that isn't open source, then maybe give an example? (If you interpreted my comment as one intended to be an argument against open source—and in favor of closed source, say—then you interpreted it incorrectly.)
> Is it a bad thing
A project that seeks contributors but exists in a state where contribution is more difficult than it could be is very much something I would call a bad thing.
> normal software development
"Normal"? Maybe. Yes, even. But not an intrinsic side effect of trying to develop software or run a project.
You could have made your point yourself, but you quoted jwz at length because you felt it loaned more credibility to the idea than if you had used your own words. I guess that was your intent, and I could be entirely wrong, but I don't blame someone else for making that conclusion.
> Either the message is true, or it isn't.
This is a discussion board. People discuss ideas. He did address your point, but he also discussed a tangent you introduced.
(apologizes for responding to you and not GP directly with some criticisms. I had a response typed somewhere...)
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.
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.
Broadcom, according to the wikipedia page for VideoCore, did however make a couple of Cortex-A9/A7 SoCs that made their way into low end 2012-3 era Android phones.
Perhaps a startup might recycle old Broadcom-based HTC and Samsung models in collaboration with the RPi team.
A RPiZ with a mobile data connection but no screen is still a potential IoT platform etc.
Openmoko with its bespoke board lived or died by how well it performed as a phone.
I recently tried lineage, ubports and plasma, and though I liked ubports, lineage was a breath of fresh air. Selinux, opengapps, regular privacy notifications, twrp, and privacy and security seem to have not taken a back seat in general. Sign me up.
If there hadn't been contracts 10yrs ago, I probably would have gotten an openmoko. Wanted one badly. If lineage, ubports, and plasma among others can keep developing alternatives to stock android, no reason to see why at least some or all hardware doesn't follow. It's taken AMD the better part of 10 years to have open source drivers that are as good as their closed source drivers on almost all of their GPUs if I'm not mistaken.
Which raises the question: if you want a phone that can run a FOSS mobile OS, what do you choose today? Nexus 5 and OPO were great a few years back (I bought the latter) but there is a need in the marketplace for (read: I need) an updated product that can run such a mobile OS.
This allows projects such as Mer, Plasma Mobile, LuneOS, UBports and AsteroidOS etc to pool efforts without any distro-specific assumptions.
Google's project treble might make haliums' job a bit easier, so you might see halium on more devices than you'd think. Just speculating.