http://www.osnews.com/story/21265/No_FreeRunner_Follow-up_Says_OpenMoko Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:14:41 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?357371 http://osnews.com/thread?357371 These guys failed because of poor vision. They didn't keep in mind that what was revolutionary about their phones was the open hardware platform, not the software. So they wasted a colossal amount of money, time and mindshare working on a new phone software stack that nobody wanted and really sucked in the end. Had they just released a WM phone with fully documented driver specs and linux drivers it would have been out the door two years ago in huge numbers and we'd all be running android or some other linux phone variant on it right now.

It really is a shame because even now with all the linux phone environments we can see that it isn't really open unless you get all the drivers specs too and the FOSS community could have provided the software. There is nothing we can do about the hardware. Mon, 06 Apr 2009 21:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (pooo) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?357533 http://osnews.com/thread?357533 Every major chipset or phone maker releases "open" reference design hardware to encourage developers. OpenMoko was probably itself based on a ref design.

That would not have been a significant value-add for OpenMoko, unless OpenMoko could have generated the volume sales (without full software?) to bring down the per-unit cost for the manufacturing run.

OpenMoko had to be a complete linux phone software platform, or nothing. It they couldn't do that in-house, then they needed a partner. Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (braddock) Comments