OpenMoko: Taking Open Source slightly too far?

[major_clanger]

During my discussion of mobile phone options I was pointed at OpenMoko, a project to create an open-source phone. It looks intriguing, but I have to say that I have concerns.

Firstly, my experiences with open-source make me rather wary of what using such a device will be like. A mobile phone is a consumer gadget, and one that it's easy to become very reliant on. If it crashes or misbehaves, I don't want to be told that there's a user forum where enthusiastic geeks can help me diagnose the problem. I want the phone to work, to stay working, and to be returnable to a dealer for replacement if it stops working.

Secondly, what about security? Not so much of the phone itself - I acknowledge that open-source systems can in fact be more secure than proprietary ones - but of the network. If the phone is open and hackable, how long before hacks start appearing that fiddle around with elements of its configuration that network providers are usually very keen stay set to predetermined states? In the short term, users might get better call quality, but how long will a cell network stay up if this sort of abuse becomes common?

Finally, what I know about the mobile phone industry suggests to me that it is an extremely technically sophisticated area. I don't doubt the enthusiasm of the OpenMoko developers, but are they biting off more than they can chew? Looking at the project wiki, some four months after development phones became available the latest news is as follows:

The Openmoko snapshot from 20071113, when employing a few steps, can sometimes (depending on the moon) make and receive calls but the dialer is in early alpha-testing state! Also note that there NO graphical frontend for handling SMS is included. Power management (suspend) is still flaky.

This for a product that is allegedly going to user release early next year!

Say what you will about the iPhone; you can at least use it to make calls with.

Comments

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

It would be nice if high consequences could be applied to somebody involved in this fiasco.

Generally open source works best when the user community and the developer community overlap. This is why there is lots of good open source network infrastructure software and no good open source calendaring software.

[covertmusic.livejournal.com]

On that note, I don't get the Rails hate here. If you look at Rails and Django, the vast majority of the developers - as in, contributors to the core source-control repositories, not the many 'client developers' if if you like - are working fulltime in web-application development. Django came out of a newspapers' newsroom, actually. The two web frameworks getting all the hype *strengthen* your argument, not weaken it - the developer community is the core of the user community.

Equally true with the infrastructural stuff that came out of LJ (perlbal, mogile etc) too, come to think of it.

Sure, there are fanboys/fangirls, but doesn't everyone just channel them out? That's what Slashdot/Digg are for - fly-paper. The Django blogs anyone actually reads are http://www.b-list.org/ and http://www.simonwillison.net/ - both of which tend right towards the nitty-gritty.

And we both know doing the Web right is hard. You've read the REST book, yeah? The thing is, a lot of the complexity isn't in the code, it's in the design and information architecture. So maybe it's not "difficult" in the way hacking on the Linux kernel is, but that's just because the complexity's been moved, not abolished.

Sure, DHH, the lead developer of Rails, is spectacularly... opinionated, but that happens everywhere. In fact, the business he works for/part-owns, 37 Signals, is not backward about coming forward.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

I agree completely that in general the people who are working on these high profile projects usually know what they are doing, and in principle it should be possible to tune the weenies out, but there are SO many of them (and don't get me wrong, there are plenty of weenies writing about Windows and Mac stuff too).
The best quote of all time was something on the lines of
Person A: Rails looks nice but I worry about the maintainability of the code
Person B: (in about March) Huh, nothing to worry about, I started a project in November and the maintainability's fine.

[covertmusic.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but those are just the same people who were contributing bad libraries to CPAN five years ago, or writing yet another PHP messageboard. Ten years ago they were probably writing very-exploitable C. Which I'd probably do if I were to attempt to write C; I still really see myself as a scientist more than a programmer, and as a result I program as a means to an end, not an end in itself...

Anyway, you can usually spot them by mentioning AJAX (not that I have a problem with the technique, or the libraries - ones like JQuery are getting quite sophisticated and certainly very useful) and standing well back.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

Point taken. I thought that the hype curve for Rails was unusually high, though. The Pragmatic Programmers Rails book (1st edition - things are hopefully better now, I don't know whether there is a 2nd edition) basically has a last chapter which amounts to 'well, having read this entire book about this wonderful technology you probably want to deploy your application, well there are 3 ways, none of which really work'. And say what you like about C, Perl or PHP, but K&R / The Camel Book / [pick an early PHP book here] didn't have a 'ha ha, only joking' final chapter.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

Though clearly this says more about the Pragmatic Programmers than the weenies. And of course, the PP aren't unique, O'Reilly is a big cheerleader for Open Source But Oh My You Still Have To Pay for Our Books technologies. Although it is interesting to note that they have basically given up on their ETEL (emerging telecoms) stream - the reasons for this would be interesting to find out.

[blue-condition.livejournal.com]

Often the user community and developer community overlap perfectly. One person. ;)

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

Well, in a sense those ones don't matter. In fact one could argue that one of the good things about open source is that when Fred produces his bit of software, if anyone downloade it and finds it useful, at least they aren't completely shafted when they find it won't run on Windows Wombat and Fred has long since lost interest and moved house and email address.

Clearly, as with anything (music / fiction ) there is the problem of finding the good stuff.

It is not the one developer one user ones that I mind. It is the ones where there are a lot of blowhards on the mailing lists talking about their wonderful plans for version 2.0 which lead one to download it only to discover that essentially it doesn't sodding work. And, of course, they have the perfect right to do this, my objection is primarily an aesthetic one about the tragic waste of human effort and ingenuity.