Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Motorola's New Open Source Resource

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the moving-slowly-in-the-right-direction dept.

illogict writes "Among with their new A1200 GNU/Linux-based mobile phone, Motorola unveiled yesterday its new community-based development platform, http://open source.motorola.com. It is primarily aimed at developers who are willing to contribute to Motorola's GNU/Linux-based mobile phones, either directly on firmware, or creating programs (native or Java) who are aimed to work on those phones. It currently features phone kernels, SD-TransFlash card reader drivers, Java MIDP3.0 draft. Such commitment on open source-development could be seen as a good step, and may show the way to other companies."

7 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. A1200 an Asian Release Only (So Far) by ewhac · · Score: 2, Informative
    The Motorola A1200 (MING) has only been released in the Asian market. So far, no US cell providers have deigned to carry it (although you can probably find someone to import it).

    Schwab

    --
    Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
  2. NO NATIVE application support!!! by Eugenia+Loli · · Score: 5, Informative

    I downloaded the source code for the A1200 and e680/a780. There IS NO WAY you can create a native graphical application with the tarballs they offer. Whoever submitted the news on Slashdot is an idiot and he didn't try the tarballs. The modified Qt/EZX toolkit is NOT included in these tarballs.

    In other words, Motorola gave us NOTHING more than they didn't before. They just released a fancy web site about it. And we, Linux phone users, STILL CAN NOT create graphical native apps!

    1. Re:NO NATIVE application support!!! by Capt.+Beyond · · Score: 4, Informative

      Sorry Eugenia, you will have to wait for Qtopia 4 and it's Safe Execution Environment (SXE) to have native applications on a Linux phone.

      --
      -- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
    2. Re:NO NATIVE application support!!! by Eugenia+Loli · · Score: 2, Informative

      I don't see why I can't have Qt 2.x.x native apps too. Zaurus had native apps and was based on the same version of Qt. The problem is not SXE or anything like that. The problem is that Motorola hasn't released their EZX SDK.

    3. Re:NO NATIVE application support!!! by Capt.+Beyond · · Score: 3, Informative
      No, the problem is with the phone operators/carrers. They are extremely paranoid.
      As an example, from this article Device Profile: Grundig Dreamphone G500i
      "The carriers are afraid of what kind of software might be connected to the network if users could run their own "hacked" Linux OSes. For example, think of an application sending millions of SMS messages per second. They expect from us a certain level of security."

      This also includes 3rd party software. Currently, Java applications are king, because they are sandboxed, and do not have full access to the device. With SXE, native applications are sandboxed as well as some other security restrictions that are in place, to restrict access to the device/network.

      --
      -- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
  3. Re:sourceforge? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    It's using the commercial version of SF (SF Enterprise Edition). It is NOT hosted on the SF.net server complex, therefore you won't find a link to it there.

  4. One word: OpenEZX project by Mafia$oft · · Score: 2, Informative
    I'm astonished that with such a specific Motorola OSS topic, the #1 OSS website about all this hasn't been mentioned yet:
    http://www.openezx.org.nyud.net:8090/

    The OpenEZX project seems to be quite active, with Harald Welte (of GPL-Violations fame) doing a lot of 2.6.x kernel porting and hardware support. Join the mailing list if you are interested in helping out with this rapidly progressing project!

    Unfortunately several people say that Motorola has been less helpful with OSS development than they could have been, but let's hope that this site will change this in a very positive way.