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Comment by grizzles | Hacker News Reader

They are wildly undercapitalized for what they are trying to do. They asked me to invest, I said no.

It will be tough for them to find investors, the phone industry is a ruthlessly competitive market.

The CEO is very headstrong. That's great when you are an expert in hardware projects, but he's not. In my opinion, they are trying to do too many things, and aren't learning from their mistakes or listening to the advice of others.

The best thing they could do right now to maximize their chances would be to lay off their software team and focus entirely on the hardware. Let the community supply that part of it.

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Yes, I think they're crazy for not just focusing on the hardware and shipping AOSP. I think the point of having a completely open source/up-streamed kernel is that it's straightforward to run any mobile OS... that they're trying to invent their own at the same time is a little ambitious.

To have the completely open up-streamed kernel would be great and that's reasonably ambitious task they could focus on. But nothing more, there is AOSP with F-droid for that.

I'd never even considered this.

Would this hurt their marketability somehow? Wonder if anyone from there is tuned in here...

As somebody who was deeply into Openmoko community back in the day, I believe that it would massively hurt their marketability.

I agree that this delay was entirely predictable though. Some time ago when I heard at their Matrix channel that "we're still targeting January" I was all like "wait, what?". A plan that gives you just 2-3 months from sending out devkits to final shipping simply has to fail; I'm glad they didn't stubbornly tried to deliver and just delayed, although I'd rather have them delay to May or June already, as it's IMO still a bit risky.

I'd like them to do that too. It's a chicken/egg/bootstrapping problem. You don't get a community of developers without HW, and you don't get a useful HW running OSS OS/userspace without the community.

OTOH, I think they'll have trouble attracting that much of a community to sustain the project if they just throw out such an expensive initially useless hardware out there.

But at least people will have something to play with. Better than promisses and sorrys.

The software needs some sort of vendor polish. Let's not repeat the mistake of OpenMoko, where its utility as a basic phone had its problems, thrown over the wall for the community to fix.

They could just ship AOSP as the default (years of polish...) as their first step.

Though this works for plenty of SBCs produced by Chinese vendors, who just slap on SoC vendor kernel on some debian userspace and that's that from the software side for them.

HW must be appealing though, even if by being dirt cheap and with plentiful options. But it still takes years for community to produce something useful.

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