[Note: In addition to pictures sent to JF and DS, a directory that includes them is here. -ds]

A White Box Phone

As we know too well, embedding Linux in a device doesn't make it "open". And while there are open Linux-based embedded devices, telephones fitting that description have been rare.

The OpenMoko phone aims to change that. Funambol (pronounced "foo-nahm'-ball"), a Taiwan-based manufacturer whose official ambition is "to bring the customer benefits of open source software to the $300 billion global mobile market", launched OpenMoko to generally positive reviews. From my own contact list, these ranged from Gordon Cook's "This is AMAZING STUFF" (in fact, I heard about it first from Gordon) to Bob Frankston's "No Wi-Fi? Huh?" and, "As I've discovered with my current programmable phone, having Wi-Fi and GPS can make a big difference".

But the quotage that matters most comes from Harald Welte, who wrote this in his blog at gnumonks.org:

In this project I'm responsible for the system-level software design and implementation. This means: Kernel, drivers, GSM communication infrastructure, etc.

So why is this project so exciting? Because it's [yet another] Linux phone? No. It's because this is the first time (to the best of my knowledge), that a vendor is

• involving (hiring) prominent community members to do the actual architecture design and implementation
• planning to completely open up their Linux distribution for any contributed development, e.g. use a package manager that can access arbitrary package feeds
• trying very hard to make sure almost everything will be Free Software, from drivers up to the UI applications
• actively providing documentation and interfaces for third party development on any level of the system, from debug interface, boot loader, kernel, middleware through the UI applications
• using X11 to allow users to run any existing X11 Linux application (within resource constraints)

So basically, from a Free Software community level, this is exactly the kind of phone you want to get involved with, and play with. Yes, it's not the perfect phone. It runs a proprietary GSM stack on a separate processor. There are some minor, self-contained proprietary bits on the back end side in userspace. But well, it's probably the best you can do as a first shot of a new generation of devices, and without too much existing market power to put on upstream vendors.

Beats anything you'll ever read in a press release.

I'll give the last word to Brad Fitzpatrick, father of LiveJournal OpenID, memcached and other fine hacks. After news of OpenMoko hit the streets, Brad wrote, "On sale Jan 2007 ... I'm totally getting one".

- Doc Searls

Resources:

Openmoko.com: http://openmoko.com

Openmoko.org: http://openmoko.org

Harald Welte's post: http://gnumonks.org/~laforge/weblog/2006/11/08/#20061108-my_no_longer_secret_project

Brad Fitzpatrick: http://brad.livejournal.com/

Bob Frankston: http://frankston.com

Gordon Cook: http://gordoncook.net