Comments on: The Lost Openmoko Community

By: Discussion 3/3: Openmoko Community Manager position? | Risto H. Kurppa

Discussion 3/3: Openmoko Community Manager position? | Risto H. Kurppa — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 23:51:34 +0000

[...] comments without the e-mail addresses are from community mailing list, the rest from the comments of my previous post. Remember, these are only parts from the messages so please check the original posts for more [...]

By: Discussion 2/3: What people want Openmoko to do? | Risto H. Kurppa

Discussion 2/3: What people want Openmoko to do? | Risto H. Kurppa — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 13:38:26 +0000

By: Discussion 1/3: Openmoko community feelings | Risto H. Kurppa

Discussion 1/3: Openmoko community feelings | Risto H. Kurppa — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 00:38:02 +0000

[...] previous post about the status of the Openmoko community raised some good discussion about the Openmoko community [...]

By: MikeD

MikeD — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:56:12 +0000

I’ve been following the OpenMoko project for a long time now. I bought into the promise of an open and free linux-based smart phone. I was sold. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. Communication has been very infrequent. And worse, the project doesn’t look like it is making any progress. The hardware looks sound. But the software isn’t even close yet. And with multiple distributions splitting the community’s efforts, there seems to be little chance of the software getting here any time soon. Look, other smart phone manufacturers can produce a new phone in less than 18 months. Hardware and Software from design to customer shipment. We have the hardware. Where is the software? We need to coordinate our software efforts so we can get our first working version released. Then, we can work on various priorities.

By: Kevin Dean

Kevin Dean — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 03:14:10 +0000

I agree with about 99% of your points here. I ranted about it in a long blog post on my site (also syndicated on planet.openmoko.org) at http://www.monochromementality.com/index.php/blog/show/FSO-Milestone-II-Phot-Safari-and–rant.html

I’m not entirely sure I blame Openmoko. I mean, the Openmoko brand is certainly going to be what takes the hit, but I get the sense that there were internal factors (like investors threatening to pull money) that caused several decisions to be made.

I’m ready to turn my back on Openmoko as a vision and a company I spend money with, yet at the same time, I’m holding out hope. I did buy into this knowing it was in development. I don’t hold any illusions that I was given a time frame for a working system. I think I’ll wait until Freerunner gets a “stable” release OR my need for a new phone/device forces me to buy a competing product before the stable release.

By: mwester

mwester — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:47:14 +0000

Well said. Openmoko sold a vision, and found an eager audience.

Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to have any idea what to do with that shared vision — as a result, the community gradually dispersed and fragmented.

Like a group of leaderless soldiers, the community has gathered around various rag-tag images and distros, trying to figure out the bits and pieces themselves.

Openmoko seems to have retreated, overwhelmed by an ever-more-restless community, they have hidden themselves behind a bugtracker fortified by draconian rules for valid bug submission. With a few notable exceptions, none of them appear on the IRC channels to speak with their army of recruits, preferring the less-direct means of communicating on the overloaded mailing lists.

–

But all is not lost, by any means. As long as people complain about the situation, there is hope — they still care. Openmoko needs to look very closely at the data that only *they* can see:

Openmoko — how many are subscribed to your email lists? How many of them are active (i.e. have sent an email in the past 6 months)? Now, how many phones did you sell, Openmoko?

Openmoko — where are those thousands of missing phones? Are they in desk drawers? Cardboard shoe boxes in closets? Dust bins? More importantly, where are those thousands of potential contributors, potential ambassadors, your in-the-field sales force for selling both the vision and the phones?

The hardware and software problems are trivial in comparison to the loss of the community mindshare — and ultimately that goes beyond a vision and goes to the bottom line. Openmoko had better hire a community manager, not for the community’s sake (although we’d certainly welcome such a person), but for their own business survival.

Openmoko: The community is your sales force. Act quickly.

By: zecke

zecke — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 06:58:50 +0000

The bugtracker is open for any kind of Openmoko (related) bugs (in the worse case you will have to file the ticket again or it gets closed as duplicate). If in doubt file a new ticket (way better than writing off topic to an existing one), feedback is required and mandatory and the bugtracker is an excellent place for that.

By: Uzytkownik

Uzytkownik — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 10:08:48 +0000

s/@ Uzytkownik/@Kombipom/g;

By: Uzytkownik

Uzytkownik — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 10:01:24 +0000

@ Uzytkownik: 1. I was saying about QT not QT Extended (AFAIK it’s based on fb). Possibly the merge was needed. Possibly SHR was the right direction (I don’t know this distribution).
2. Well – I prefere the Gnome model. By small steps but it changes (gio vs. gnomevfs, remove of gnomeui, libgnome, gail etc.). Of course sometimes it is not possible – but it creates fustration.

By: Kombipom

Kombipom — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 09:42:49 +0000

@ Uzytkownik. I’m not an expert as I said, that’s just the impression I got from the OM guys when the change happened. Also I think the Qtopia phone stack and 2007 phone apps couldn’t co-exist as they had different low level interfaces to the hardware that clashed. I think that there were a lot of issues with the original gsmd and neod daemons which were sidestepped with Qtopia until FSO steps in to replace it properly.
2. I think that you could say that KDE4 has been very bad PR, people don’t like change and obviously we all would prefer stability but sometimes revolution is required in order to deliver the greatest potential for the future this applies to KDE and OM and in both cases everybody was warned that this is just the start and that there is much work to be done. You can’t build a castle on the foundations of a garden shed, you have to start again and dig a big hole and make a mess first.