Motorola's New Open Source Resource

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."

Comments

Amiga

[Ithika]

A mobile phone based on the A1200? With Motorola technology? Who would have guessed.

Lets see how they handle things

[moore.dustin]

I think it is a great move, but I just wonder how people who actually contribute will be treated by the company down the road. Often times, little or no credit is given to someone who makes a successful and meaningful contribution because they could easily just take the idea and release it as a feature on the next iteration of the phone. Either way it is a great move on the companies part - they can rest now and let other people come up with the next ideas that will sell the phones next iteration.

Why is this open source??

[i am kman]

Hmmm, open source for a proprietary, niche HW platform. Sounds like they're too cheap to hire their own developers and are using the Open Source buzzward in hopes for some free SW development.

So, there was some debate about whether you can package proprietary drivers with open source. So, can you package open source drivers with proprietary hardware?

Open source generally implies users installing the OS on their own devices. I don't really see this happening on a large scale with Motorola since it'll come pre-bundled. So on has to wonder, what's the point of open sourcing stuff?

Please let Motorola get it right..

[moreati]

Motorola showed actual thought and innovation for the V3 RAZR and it's ilk. Thin flip-phones makes so much more sense. I hope they can do it again with the software.

Other than an old Ericsson T39m, the V3i is the best phone design I've ever used. That is, except for the software - which is.. quirky, to say the least. Games consoles get much of the attention in terms of reverse engineering and modding, each generation is designed to be more locked down and 'trustworthy'. However phones seem to have fared infinately better against the modding crowds and this sucks. Mobile operators get away with charging 15p for a 20 byte SMS and other restrictions that would leave Sony/MS XBox division drooling.

I wish it were possible to rip the Motorola supplied firmware and replace it with something buggy but useful. I wish I could sync to anything and actually run real software, that does real things like access bluetooth and the camera. I wish my current phone could run programs written in C, C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, C# and AIML. I want my phone to make a Star Trek communicator noise every time it opens. I want it to work in landscape mode and allow input from a bluetooth keyboard and to log GPS. I want it to do all the things Motorola didn't think of or didn't have the budget for.

So please, if anyone from Motorola is reading, do this properly. Open up more than just a few smartphones or far east only models. Let your geek users break from the shackles of MIDP across everything. I note from TFA that you've released an open source mmc+sd driver, that's a great move - make it the first of many.

Thanks

Alex

On the other side...

[OpenSourced]

Such commitment on open source-development could be seen as a good step

But we can always spin it to look like pure evil.

Its more how the carriers handle things

[EmbeddedJanitor]

In the US, quite a few phone features are turned off because the carriers don't want them available. For example, some phones that are internally wifi capable have the wifi disabled to prevent them meing used as VoIP handsets, thus forcing people to use regular (billable) phone services instead.

So if new apps start to threated revenue streams for the carriers you can expect them to be disbaled. Or, alternatively, you can expect the carriers to provide their own similar services. If you think about how MS destroyed 3rd party middleware developers you'll probably be on the right track.

NO NATIVE application support!!!

[Eugenia Loli]

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!

Re:NO NATIVE application support!!!

[Capt. Beyond]

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.

Re:NO NATIVE application support!!!

[Capt. Beyond]

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.