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Why Open Source Phones Still Fail
adeelarshad82 writes "Truly open-development, open-source phones like the Nokia N900 will never hit the mainstream in the US because wireless carriers in the country hate the unexpected, writes PCMag's Sascha Segan. The open-source philosophy is all about unexpected, disruptive ideas bubbling upwards, and that drives network planners nuts. So, you get unsatisfactory hybrids like Google Android, which uses some open-source components but locks third-party developers into a crippled Java sandbox. The bottom line is that while Linux the OS, the kernel, and the memory manager are attractive to phone manufacturers, Linux the philosophy — and users banding together ad hoc to create new things — is anathema to wireless carriers."
No carrier wants geeks. Geeks use up a lot of network resources, try to find ways around rules, and create problems for tech support.
Yes. But geeks also build new cool applications never before thought possible, that become next year's must-haves.
In a sense, the iPhone app ecosystem is proof to that, despite its less-than-open review process. Palm and the PC as well, if you want to go back in history.
How hard can it be for the base-station to monitor bandwidth and avoid taking the whole network down?
--
Meet co-founders for your startup
"The open-source philosophy is all about unexpected, disruptive ideas bubbling upwards, and that drives network planners nuts."
Open source phones are about being user configurable, extendable and customizable. Wireless carriers like to charge for features, by the feature, and they don't like forking over what you've already paid for. That's pretty hard to do when you don't control one end of the transaction, as others have found out.
No buzzwords or BS about "disruptive ideas bubbling upwards" required.
If they had their way, we would be paying them large amounts of money for nothing whatsoever. It's up to us to show dissatisfaction by either political action demanding open access or refusing to buy smartphones until a completely open one comes to market.
No.
It's because they cost hundreds of dollars.
I want an open source phone, I really do, but I can't justify spending 500 on little more than a PDA + phone. I already had a PDA once, hardly used it, and phones that just work as phones are less than a hundred these days. Make an open source phone that's a reasonable price and I'll buy it.
They fail in the mainstream market because there's such a small market for them. The Nokia n900 is a geek's dream, but most people want a phone, not a handheld computer. Most as in 99.99% of the marketplace. And even fewer want a multi-hundred dollar handheld computer/phone. So I'm sure it sells well in the market it was designed for...that .001% of the population that wants a hackable, programmable micro computer that makes calls. So it succeeds where its market is. Saying it fails is like saying the Audi R8 supercar failed. Though, at least that made it into Iron Man.
You could say the iPhone is a failure as well: it only has 1% of the cell phone market. But I think most of the U.S. will disagree with that statement.
I suspect open development phones will become more mainstream as the smartphone and the laptop merge. As phone hardware improves, it's not so hard to imagine a phone with, say, a DisplayPort mini connection (or perhaps a pico projector), USB support, and bluetooth support will displace laptops as the mobile computers of choice. Perhaps instead of buying a laptop you instead buy a widescreen monitor and USB keyboard and mouse and plug those into your phone. Perhaps you just plug your phone into your HDTV and use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
For me, the Nokia N900 represents the beginning of this trend. It really is more of a mobile computer which happens to have a phone function. However, longer term, I don't think this necessarily means Linux will be the dominant mobile computer platform. If Intel's Atom CPUs improve their power usage to the point where it's reasonable to put them in devices of the N900's class, then you'd have to suspect that Windows will become the dominant operating system as it is for laptops today.
There's already a working example of this the model is quite profitable...
It's called the internet. A bunch of service providers give out *relatively* unregulated bandwidth in limited amounts such that ppl CAN do whatever they want without killing the infrastructure. Complete, total, and unfounded bullshit to believe they can't just calculate: user.bandwidth = tower.bandwidth / average_users_per_tower
Their business model, just like every other is an evolution of what they're familiar with: regulate everything down to the minimum, charge to give it back. We no longer have manual switchboards that require paid labor to operate, you can make a call to the other side of the planet for the same cost as next-door but they still charge more cause it's what people are used and it is profitable.
Carrier will or won't adopt a Linux phone based, not on merits of it's operating system but their ability to market it. Most people never heard of Linux, most nobody has heard of maemo, and there aren't any mass appeal apps to it. The lack of a specific extraordinary (massively appreciated) quality makes it a competitor to every other large-screen keyboard phone out there, in which case just sell one of them which everyone is already familiar with (e.g. another WinMo phone). The sad fact of the matter is the most people still see cell phone as just phones, they don't care that you can install bittorrent and dl pirated movies straight to your pocket. I sure as hell do which is why I bought one, but despite explaining this to other people all I get is: "so you can fix my computer?"
...the same carriers will let you plug a mobile internet stick into your laptop and run anything you want over their 3G network. No sim locking... No "per message" charges. The stench of hypocrisy is hard to miss.
The public message is that protectionist activities like SIM locking, sandboxing and removing features from phones is about "network security". The reality is that it is about MONEY. Carriers want a cut of everything you do on their network and this requires them to control the handset and the user experience. They will fight tooth and nail to ensure they maintain whatever control they can. BlackBerry, iPhone and Andriod are chipping away at the edges but it has been a long hard uphill struggle. In the end, the customers are the ones who lose.
Yeah, the N900 will never hit main stream. That's why they had to delay the release because Nokia was over whelmed by pre-orders, right? Because that's a clear sign no one is going to get it.
It's not that this will be different it's that you're dealing with morons who still don't get that after 15+ years their little pet project has gone nowhere. Linux has failed in the consumer market because the same reasoning they use to cling to Linux is the same reason the consumer market rejects it. Consumers want predictable. Consumers don't want to have to be engineers to use a machine. Consumers don't want to have to keep up on geek trends.
There will never be a year of Linux on the desktop. Linux has lost in the consumer market. It's over. But if a bunch of losers want to keep on going at it I won't stand in their way. They can keep on losing.
"Truly open-development, open-source phones like the Nokia N900..."
are you kidding me???
what is "Truly open-development, open-source" about a platform that has
* proprietary power management (bme)
* no docs for the gsm modem interface (and no source code for the apps using it)
* proprietary powervr graphics drivers
* proprietary osso-dsp-modules
read also:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1584
http://wiki.maemo.org/Why_the_closed_packages
i'm not so much pissed by proprietary applications as i can replace the rootfs by a free and open source one what pisses me off is the undocumented hardware used and lacking communication with upstream kernel development.
dont call this device "truly open"-blah... it is definitely NOT.
there are a few devices that strive to be as open as a linux phone should be:
openmoko tried and indeed even though the calypso is undocumented they provided a implementation of how to interface it and thanks to it one can use all of its hardware without binary blobs - NOT POSSIBLE ON THE N900!!!
then there is the FLOW by gizmoforyou which uses a gumstix overo as the base and added a telit modem for which you can download the FULL DOCS from their website - hey guys at nokia, this is the kind of modem you should have picked if you wanted your device to be called "truly open"!
the modem used in the n900 uses ISI for which no reference interpretation in oss exists.
is it only me or did the slashdot crowd forget what "truly open" means and is now all over a device that is open on the top but not if one wants to really start messing around with it?
...then how do you explain MS-DOS and the first several generations of Windows.
All of this "but it's so hard" nonsense sounds nice if you just fell off the turnip
truck yesterday and have never actually used Linux. Otherwise it's simply absurd.
If what you say were really true, Apple would have put Microsoft out of business a very long time ago.
Now it might be accurate to say that people favor "predictable hard to use malware infested CRAP that they are used to" versus anything else. They would rather eat the dirt they know rather than try something new. THAT would be an accurate observation based on the actual facts.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
His email address is ...@ovi.com. Ovi is the name of Nokia's internet services brand, so it looks like this is just astroturfing.
You couldn't be more wrong. Astroturfing is when you hide your professional affiliation, pretending to be completely objective and disinterested. This person is doing exactly the opposite. That's commonly known as advocacy, and it's perfectly all right in my books, because we can weigh what they say on its merits.
General note: I'm getting really, really tired of people who think bias has anything to do with the merits of an argument. Bias is good. It breeds enthusiasm and makes it clear which side a person is arguing. Until we all become Spock, there will be no objectivity in the world, so let's quit pretending that objective sources exist.
That said, anyone who can't change his mind in the face of a better argument is just a fool.
Go ahead, prove me wrong. I'm willing to listen. 8^)
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
I didn't even read the article, but this is the biggest piece of garbage ever. Open source phones are not "failing", Android is booming at the moment. And developers are certainly not "locked" into a Java sandbox, that's merely the method that is support by Google (by using Eclipse + Android plugin).
See http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/1.6_r1/index.html:
Android applications run in the Dalvik virtual machine. The NDK allows developers to implement parts of their applications using native-code languages such as C and C++. This can provide benefits to certain classes of applications, in the form of reuse of existing code and in some cases increased speed.
The author also seems to be under the impression that Android is created by a bunch of "banded together" users, when in reality it's actually Google using predeveloped open-source libraries, plus their own bits and piece, which they have themselves open sourced.
Sascha Segan should be fired.
So presumably you're an anarchist, then? Repeal the laws against rape and murder - can't have the government telling us what to do. Might as well disband the police force since there's now nothing for them to enforce. Everyone can just buy a gun and defend themselves. It's a bit rough on the infirm and elderly, but on the bright side, they're not likely to live long enough to cause a problem, so maybe that's OK.
Or is it just that governments have no business telling corporations what do to? I have noticed that a lot of libertarians don't appear to have a problem with laws like the DMCA. Maybe the ideal here is that corporations be above the law, since all a law is, is a government mandate. After all, financial deregulation has worked out so well recently.
It's just propaganda. The whole notion of a self-regulating free market working to the betterment of all is a myth.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
... so you're one of the guys screwing up communications on the amateur bands, just for your fun. Thanks. Thanks a lot. And thanks for caring about someone other than yourself. Would you corrupt others' Internet communications as readily?
(n.b.: This type of illegal CB operation is especially bad because the illegal "channels" used are in the portion of the amateur 10m band used for international narrowband, weak-signal work -- usually in Morse code, and often at the threshold of audibility in a 250 Hz bandwidth. Since the transmission modes were different, the illegal operators often can not hear the communications they are disrupting; further, since the "freebanders" use wider, single sideband transmissions, a single illegal transmission can interfere with dozens of narrowband signals at once. Since this band is capable of worldwide communication at certain points in the sunspot cycle, the interference can quite literally be global in nature.)
By the way, the world has changed. In the UK, an amateur radio licence is now free, valid for the lifetime of the user, and available online. If you're worried about the licence examination (but you're a geek, so technical matters are no problem for you -- right?) there are clubs that will hire the room, give you the study book, and teach you the exam material, all for £45. So if you want to talk to the world, why not just follow existing international standards and agreements, and get an amateur radio license?