Re: The future of mobile computing.

[Omar Radwan]

>Its a huge effort, and very risky. Are you familiar with the history of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko ?

>I think developing more libre drivers for devices that run Replicant is our best bet for free mobile computing.

I am familiar with it, and how it didn't spark enough interest, even their webpage is offline now. But that is easily explainable why most people wouldn't care about it. First because it didn't look very good, it was the other way around, it looked terrible. And that it didn't have alot of features normal people would care about. It was a very nice phone on the software side if you ask me, being fully free was AMAZING. Too bad I was too late to the party. 

It is a very risky effort, and it would pay off it succeeded. Look at Jolla, they base most of their OS on GNU/Linux, though they won't Free most of what they wrote because of the same reason that most other software manufacturers won't free their software, they only care about profit, they don't care about the user. Jolla is a multi million dollar company after just 3 years. Because they already had the software stack ready from Meego and they ran it on their own hardware. We don't need to write anything above the kernel, other than applications which use broadband connection. We are in the perfect position to make our own mobile device, a tablet would work too. Just something to let us put our foot in mobile-space. We just need a hardware design, manufacturers that will agree to assemble the hardware and either give us Free firmware, or make it easy for us to write our own, and start an indiegogo campaign. To get to the indiegogo campaign it shouldn't take us more than a year. And I do believe that alot of people will want the phone by then, if we generate enough hype. But not like Ubuntu and promise something for 3 years that still hasn't come out. We have to set an exact date and make sure the phone is released by that date. 

On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 12:53 PM, Dave Crossland <address@hidden> wrote:

On 10 December 2014 at 15:37, Omar Radwan <address@hidden> wrote:

I think it would be a great idea

Its a huge effort, and very risky. Are you familiar with the history of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko ?

I think developing more libre drivers for devices that run Replicant is our best bet for free mobile computing.