Slashdot Mirror
Motorola's Linux Phones Frustrate Developers
n8willis writes "Three years after Motorola first announced it was migrating its smart phones to Linux -- and a dozen models later -- there are still virtually no third-party applications for them, much less open source ones. Symbian and Microsoft both give away free SDKs to all willing developers, but Motorola seems to be putting up hurdles instead. An article on NewsForge asks why is this the case?" NewsForge is a Slashdot sister site.
Those Linux phones would frustrate me too. Having to pipe AT commands directly from the command line to get them to dial, or use apt-get to manage contact details is fairly tedious.
Motorola's UI department is seriously THE WORST in the industry. Having owned numerous Motorola phones I really think they need to stop hiring artists to design their phones and employ some UI engineers.
Knowledge-hoarding and incompetence from a big company? It's likely the move to Linux was made to either save money or as retribution from a manager/VP that was displeased with the previous supplier.
Motorola's customers are NOT we end-users, but the phone companies that buy the phones and get people to sign up to contracts with them. Unless it's those companies kicking up a fuss, Motorola probably couldn't care less. Why should they? Motorola never sold a phone to an individual buyer, only to companies looking for features like locking the phone into a specific network.
Don't Hate, Gestate
The real customer is Verizon, or Voda, or whomever the cell provider is. And the providers want to sell the crap they make, not good and free alternatives.
The big question is, what does Motorola gain by obstructing willing developers from bringing software to their platform?
Control.
The RAZR and its ilk are standing on the shoulders of marginal work (like the v600)...Motorola tends to make the first few iterations, then bugfix, then make a good stable product. It's entirely possible that the Linux models aren't ready for primetime yet. (This is based on my experience with four v600's, a MPx220, and a RAZR.)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I though it was blindingly obvious at the announcement that Mototola only saw Linux as a free os to run a Java VM on, if they had a hardware chip they could run the VM on Linux would be in the bin for the next product release.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Well as i said on Osnews already, i'm one of the moderators/editor from motorolafans.com, and have been since the beginning, and it's true that motorola hasn't been exactly helpfull with getting the sourcecode and they still owe us the bootloader code, too. The reason that they are so unhelpful is ofcourse really obvious. Who are their customers? The big telco companies. Where do big telco companies make their money from? From their customers calling with their phones. If you start giving out the kernel source and encourage hacking on these phones (with sdio hardware and a mini usb host controller), the users will be voiping in no time, which would piss of their customers, the telco's.
Verizon, Cingular, etc. : "Hello Moto, we make a significant amount of money charging total idiots for the right to license crappy ring tones, useless apps, games, and backgrounds. If you release a phone to our customers that allows them to install their own apps, music, and images we will stop buying your phones. Speaking of which, make sure we can lock out DUN and OBEX on your new line of bluetooth phones."
Motorola: "Yes sir, sorry sir."
I was interested in writing a lightweight kernel to play with on the Motorola e815 and similar phones. Compiling binaries for the phone's cpu is no big deal, but the phone requires its kernel to be digitally signed.
If you replace the built in kernel with an unsigned one, it won't run. I swore my ass off when I learned that, although I wasn't surprised.
For anyone who claims there might be some FCC regulations that prevent this sort of experimentation, you won't produce interference accidentally with these phones. The radio interface is not complicated.
(And don't get me started with Verizon crippling the Motorola phones they sell. It's best to buy the phones independently from the service.)
I think the network service providers (Verizon et al.) should be banned from subsidizing phones, and be should be forced to allow the use of any phone compliant with the their networks' standards. There was an explosion in diversity of landline phones, and massive improvements in their capabilities and prices, when AT&T was similarly forced to untie the endpoint hardware from their network service. I want to see the same explosion occur in the wireless market.
Their goal is to lock you in to old rates for a year or two at a time, and thereby avoid the amazing price competition which occurred in wired network phone service. If buying the handsets is decoupled from subscribing to the network, they'll have no reasonable rational for forcing people to sign long-term contracts, and we'll see proper competition again. I'd be happy as hell to see that. I want phones that serve me, rather than the network service provider.
you have obviously not had the misfortune of having to use Sony/Ericsson's phones, ever.
I have a T610. It's an OK phone, I guess, but there are a number of irritating quirks about it. For instance--there is no easily-discoverable sequence to the "received calls" list. Apparently, some genius thought that linear time is not relevant when considering whose calls you might have just missed. Unfortunately, since I don't live in an experimental piece of modernist fictional literature, I am left wondering who the hell called me and when.
My general complaint with mobile phones is that they have suffered from two great evils: feature bloat and a fetish for miniaturization. My phone is tremendously useful on paper, but the complexity of its operation (for everything but regular phone calls) mean most of those features are essentially useles. Add this to the fact that its tiny size makes controlling it needlessly difficult.
I blame the engineers who put the thing together. I also blame the marketing departments, who have compelled their engineers to fight a generally useless "button race," in the futile hope of being the most "full-featured" phone on the market.
One thing I'll say about Nokia: they've been very good at UI. I might buy one of their phones, next.
They dont want native applications because they are more likely to brick the phone, causing warranty and customer support nightmare for carriers.
I definently have to call bullshit, at least based on what's in the summary in this article.
The Motorola SDK for their mobile phones is available right now, both the linux and non-linux varieties of phones.
This article is discussing, of course, the availability of the linux source code itself, not the SDK. You do not need the linux source code in order to develop applications for their linux-based mobile phones, and to be perfectly honest, having to jump through hoops to get the kernel source really isn't that big a deal, since getting the SDK is as simple as signing up at www.motocoders.com
ash
Most normal Motorola phones (like the E378i I have) use something called a Neptune as the main processor (its an ARM with a DSP inside I believe) with a custom motorola operating system (known as p2k in the moto modding community because of the p2k.sys driver used to access it).
The Motorola Linux phones use a platform called EZX. This consists of a Neptune processor like in a normal p2k phone with a (presumably different) version of the p2k operating system running on it to handle the network side (i.e. actually talking to the cell tower) and then an Intel ARM chip running a modified version of MontaVista Linux for the rest of the phone software.
They are using a modified version of the BLOB bootloader and a 2.4.x Kernel.
The userland is made up of various normal utillities (e.g. glibc, gnu fileutils etc) plus a (aparently hevily modified) version of qtEmbedded and a pile of motorola specific stuff.
Motorola HAVE released a kernel source tree for the EZX phones. And people have reported getting it to compile and run on their phones. Whether its complete, up-to-date or accurate I dont know.
Motorola are under no obligation to provide any SDK for these phones.
The only thing they need to do is to release the source code for any components under licences that require them to do so (e.g. BLOB, kernel, glibc etc). So far, other than the kernel release, they have not done so.
Several requests have been sent to motorola requesting the source code to those comonents but so far, no code has been forthcomming.
Motorola are under no obligations to share the source code, SDKs, docs, headers etc to the motorola specific stuff on the phone (unless its some how derived from GPL code that is). They are also not under any obligation to share any code to things like qtEmbedded (they probobly have a commercial licence from trolltech for that).
There are reports of a "leaked" SDK for EZX phones but I dont know much about it (using it would probobly be a violation of copyright anyway so its probobly best not to)
The most promising work is going on at www.openezx.org. People there are trying to make replacements for the motorola propriatory kernel modules and software bits as well as trying to reverse engineer the propriatory libraries motorola have used as well as trying to get motorola to release the code required under GPL (having the motorola version of BLOB in particular would be nice since it could lead to a better way to modify things on the phone without some of the hacks that are required now)
Thanks to the OpenEZX project for most of the information contained here.