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Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

"Stallman and the like may have produced fine C compilers and text editors but it would seem unlikely for them to come up with something like the iPhone."

Actually they did, it was called 'Openmoko' and it was released before the iPhone (albeit there wasn't much between the two). It wasn't just an open source smart phone OS, but also open hardware as well.

Sadly it never took off: partly because iOS (and later, Android) were busy reshaping the mobile landscape; and partly because corporations started adopting Linux for mobile OSs which dragged many of the hacker crowd away from independent set ups.

As to whether Openmoko would have succeeded if it was conceived a couple of years earlier; or whether it such a project was too ambitious without corporate backing, i don't know. But for a while there was an a community driven smart phone available to buy.

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I googled that and one of the first results was "OpenMoko Train Wreck", a video showing how clunky the phone was and how poor the UI is (teeny tiny software keyboard etc).

Looked more like a replacement to early versions of Windows mobile.

I suppose the question is why is this, is it just that the folks who are driven to open source development don't have a sense for aesthetics and convenient UIs?

Yes this is true, but to be 100% honest, it wasn't finished. If you remember very early Android prototypes, they were in about the same place.

It's a matter of resources. It was a very ambitious project, and they didn't have the funding behind it that Apple and Google do.

> I suppose the question is why is this, is it just that the folks who are driven to open source development don't have a sense for aesthetics and convenient UIs?

No. They do have a sense of aesthetics and convenient UIs. Ubuntu is an example. Open Source follows the trial-and-error iterative approach. If the project has enough momentum, the end is bound to be near-perfect, having gone through so many iterations and decisions by the users itself.

However, the problem with Open Source + Hardware is that hardware is too slow and unnatural for iterative development.

While that's true, you have to bare in mind that the project barely made it past alpha stage and was anything but stable. So it's not really fair to compare OpenMoko to the matured interfaces we enjoy today.

Plus if you look at how long the iPhone was in development and compare that against the development time of OpenMoko, then I think you'll agree that what they achieved was impressive project given the lack of resources they had compared to businesses such as Apple and Google.

"Looked more like a replacement to early versions of Windows mobile."

Given that we're talking pre-iOS and Android, it's not really all that surprising. Back then, most smart phone OSs were pretty crap. Regardless of whether you believe that Apple innovated the mobile industry, there was a huge leap forward in OS design around then; and Openmoko pre-dates that leap.

That's sort of my point in that the "disruptive" products that really move the needle in terms of expectations seem to be produced as proprietary products first.

This means they get hype and first mover advantage which in turn means they get a chance to tie up the best deals for content etc and get lock-in.

Things often work out that way, but there are exceptions. For example Firefox raised expectations of what a good browser can be like. But then I guess you could argue that Firefox has enjoyed large contributions from Google and thus isn't a true community project either. So I'm not really sure where to draw the line.

However I don't want to sound argumentative as you do make a valid point there. It just wasn't clear from your earlier iPhone comparison that you were talking about disruptive products specifically (or perhaps I misread your post to mean that community-lead smart phones could never exist?). Either way, I think we essentially agree here :)

>given the lack of resources they had compared to businesses such as Apple and Google.

I think this is exactly the kind of issue that crusso was speaking to. Richard Stallman et. al. don't have a realistic solution to this problem. "Just work for free" isn't realistic. "Just get paid by IBM" sounds good until you realize that you're essentially on IBM's IT staff and they happen to open source their tools. They're not producing the products that get ordinary people off the couch and opening their wallet. The closest they'll get is producing a single technical ingredient that someone else will use to make such a product.

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