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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."
because wireless carriers in the country hate the unexpected
So does any network admin worth his salt. This isn't a failing of wireless carriers, it's not even a negative. I want them to be like this, this attitude makes me a happy customer. Think about the alternatives; a completely open platform which would allow a wireless consumer to do ANYTHING on the network, possibly disrupting other customers. Namely, disrupting ME.
So no. Allow them to be cautious with their network, as long as they continue to provide decent service ( verizon, excellent network where I am ). I could stand lower costs, but that's not what this article is about.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Whether or not the N900 reaches iPhone numbers is irrelevant to the fact that it will stand in computer history along with the Kaypro II, PDP-11, SORD IS-11, Altair 8080;
I don't care if AT&T likes it or not.
If you actually get your hands on one, you will understand that it feels good to actually own something, and not pay to carry the wireless equivalent of a cable box.
If people in America were "customers" and actually were allowed to decided what they wanted, and not "consumers" to be culled by the wireless carriers, then the N900 would on it's merits be the best selling mobile computer of all times.
Does anyone really like the fact that all you can get from the big wireless carriers is what they want you to have, and not what you want?
Those that go out and buy an N900 will understand.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
As always, follow the money.
However, there's more to it than that. You should have said American wireless carriers. European wireless carriers don't get to play that game, nor do South American carriers, nor Asian carriers. So really the PCMag columnist is pretty myopic. The utterly bizarre wireless market that exists in the United States is nearly unique in the world, and the majority of the world's population lives somewhere else. Open source phones will do just fine because there are great big markets for them on every continent except North America. And since it's not like the Nokia N900 or any of its components are manufactured in the United States, the greedy graspy control freak US carriers can't affect it in the slightest.
They don't. You can write native code for Android phones. You just need a small java wrapper nothing more.
Here you go. A port-o-rotary for $200. They provide full source and schematics. You can even buy a 6000mAh battery to run the thing for weeks and you don't have to deal with any PDA functionality. Any more complaints?
Radios are expensive. The only reason phones are cheap is because they're heavily subsidized or because they're a simple little phone produced a million at a time from a small handful of highly-integrated mixed analog/digital ASICs. "Open-source" devices are small-run devices with hopelessly obsolete radio hardware because it's all they can get documentation for and manufacturers aren't looking to release their secret sauce to just anybody.
And on top of all of this, most of the open-source types are desktop or server programmers. On the desktop, you don't have to think about low-power code. Everything changes when you're running off a battery. There just isn't the expertise there (yet). Having said all this, I love my rooted T-mobile G1. I built a scratchbox environment for it and ported a few important CLI tools and it's now perfectly capable of being all the pocket Linux machine I need and it's not very difficult getting Debian running on top of the Android environment.
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Get any sort of decent battery life out of a mesh network with no towers while still maintaining access to the PSTN and emergency services.
If it isn't a "public" phone system but was more like a large voip network they might be able to find loopholes.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
One of the stipulations that Google managed to have placed in the FCC license for commercial 4G LTE spectrum is open device access, which is absent in current wireless spectrum licenses. They did this by getting approval for a clause that if a certain minimum bid for the spectrum was met, that that open device access rule would go into effect, then they bid that amount, and then proceeded to let Verizon outbid them, ensuring that clause would go into effect. Carriers may have been able to get away with this type of draconian control over their networks in the past, but it seems that's coming to an end with the shift to 4G LTE already underway. With this open device access regulation, actual user-accessible open source handsets may finally be able to see widespread use.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Android features it's own custom vm which is far behind the sun's vm. While the main gui stuff on android has to be done in java there's a very nice and easy to use native developement kit that allows you to write the performance critical portions of your code in c/c++ (with some limitations). As of NDK version 1.6 you can also access OpenGL directly, paving the way for truely performant 3D games. I could provide you with some links but i don't think they'd work with your brain anyways...
/puts of flame proof long johns/ You want to know why Linux hasn't had a snowball's chance in hell at retail? It is actually quite simple: You can't shop for Linux devices at Walmart without playing the paperweight roulette, which scares the living hell out of consumers!
If you really want Linux to have that critical breakout, then get the heads of all the major distros together, have them shake the living hell out of Linus and the other kernel devs, and nobody is allowed to leave the building until an agreed upon standard is written and approved to where you can just put a "Linux 32/64" folder on the driver CD and be done with it!
There are PLENTY of shops like mine who would LOVE to sell Linux machines, there are plenty of mainstream customers that could use Linux security, but I can't sell it and they won't buy it. Why? Because you can't answer these questions-which wireless USB cards on sale at Best Buy work in distro foo? Printer? Sound cards? Can you give me a 100% guarantee that my customers can shop at Walmart/Best Buy/Staples and have ZERO chance of getting a paperweight? You can't, because Linux and the driver situation is all fucked up. The kernel developers should be worried about the kernel and NOT maintaining fricking printer drivers!
With Windows I can say "see this pretty little flag on the box? See how it says "certified for Windows 7"? Yeah, that's you. Just look for that and you are good". It takes a customer all of 5 seconds to look at the box and shop with confidence. same thing with OSX, just look for the little Apple and the "10.whatever" and if it lines up with what you got? Hooray, you're all set to go. With Linux you get the "fun" of trawling forums before you can even buy a damned thing (which if you believe mainstream customers are gonna research before purchase I got some swampland in AR to sell you) and Deity help you if the "driver" which usually needs some serious fricking tweaking and CLI foo to get going was written for firmware A and you got firmware F, because guess what? Enjoy your paperweight!
Just make it simple guys. Remember KISS? Make it so hardware manufacturers can put Linux drivers on the CD and a penguin on the box without having to keep an assload of driver developers on hand just to try to keep up with the shifting sand that is Linux right now. Make it so ANY customer WITHOUT needing to do research or put in a metric crapload of CLI commands can simply walk into Best Buy and put a device in their cart and know 100% that it will work on Linux. If the "inferior" Windows and OSx can do that, then surely you guys can too...right?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Fun thing is: the personal computer could be described exactly in that way some twenty years ago.
What we should expect is that every happy geek realizes their responsibility (woa) in making software/proving that the n900 platform is better than any other.
The n900/Maemo is the chance cool people (e.g. geeks) have to prove their point with support from a major player in the cell phone market. In some way (since it is all this "open"/"free"), if the n900 fails, the open source community/cool people/geeks are also failing.
The article is right about it's historical background and all but lacks some optimism... hehe
I am an American who has lived in Asia and who has used GSM phones exclusively since my first mobile phone in the USA in 1997. While I did use several contract-subsidized phones, I made sure they were world-band phones and I got them "unlocked" by the carrier so I could use them overseas with different SIMs.
Years before I left the USA, I started buying my "unlocked" phones over the Internet and just sticking my existing subscription SIM into them, just as you can in other countries. When I visited the USA, I bought a prepaid SIM for about $15, which included $10 of credits, and then put it in my phone which I had brought back from Asia. When I relocated, I did this again, to get a new local phone number in a different region (Los Angeles versus Chicago). I added cash value at the register in the telecom's stores, just like I did in malls in Asia, except when I bought scratch-off prepaid value cards in other discount stores, just like I could in Asia.
I think some people confuse Verizon (CDMA) in the USA with the entire phone market, not realizing that consumers do have a choice of going with much the same mixture of GSM options you get in the rest of the world (except different radio frequencies). I've never had to pay the telecom provider to use features of my phone like bluetooth, or ringtones installed by USB cable, or even GPRS tethering (except of course data services I consume such as GPRS Internet access).
The only thing I wish would happen is that the market demand fair pricing, so we can see reasonable network service charges like I saw in Asia: unlimited Internet, whether mobile browsing or tethered access, should cost about $30/month and be available unbundled from contracts. I could use a prepaid SIM to do this in Asia, simply deducting one day's, one week's, or one month's service fee from my balance to enable EDGE Internet service for that period of time.
Very insightful operation. A mesh network for cellular communications is impractical, we just do not have enough bandwidth to make it work and it would be impossible to regulate. And regulation of the spectrum is not a bunch of BS like other regulation, its a hard, physics rooted, necessity.
Also, its not as simple as it sounds. It takes a team of engineers to monitor and place towers is a geographic region for a carrier. Adding one can actually make reception WORSE in some areas if you don't know what you are doing. So again, if we have crappy cell networks using engineered structured networks that cost billions of dollars to run just imagine what you'd get out of a peer to peer long range communications scheme.(hint, crap)
In the UK we were using CB radios illegally for years.
The government set rules that laid out the only legal channels (40 of them) and no shop was allowed to sell rigs that could receive/transmit on other channels.
These 40 shitty channels were chosen to not fit with CBs sold anywhere else in the world.
My first CB (20 years ago?) had 200 channels. Only 40 of them were legal, 40 more of them are now legal (the mid-band 40 that other countries use was added to the legal 40 giving 80 legal channels).
So many people in my City alone had illegal rigs that the law was never enforced. I knew (and know) of nobody who was ever prosecuted for not having the £££ Ham Radio licence that permitted broadcast on those frequencies.
I still have about 5 highly illegal rigs although I haven't used a CB in many years.
If someone were to start the fire and Skype/FreeGSM/Mesh internet handsets were to be available to you and me, then someone somewhere (China? Russia?) would see it as profitable to make them available for £50. People I know are buying '3' handsets because the data plan is compatible with an always on Skype connection. £70 and they get a shit phone but free Skype. It doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to see that people would pay for something even if it wasn't legal and then to see that there would be so many people at it that the government would have to make it legal or hire more police.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
You've just demonstrated the precise problem: the Linux kernel developers would rather maintain a set of ideals with which the vast majority of their users do not agree than provide a standard driver interface for Linux drivers that would leave them source-compatible or binary-compatible between different versions of the Linux kernel. They'd rather release kernel updates that break every third-party driver every so often to encourage driver and hardware developers to open-source their work in exchange for integration into the mainline kernel tree.
Three separate attempts to create a portable standard for device drivers have already come and gone: the Uniform Driver Interface that started from the mainstream commercial Unix world, guaranteed source and binary compatibility of UDI drivers between OSs on one architecture, and died from pure politics; the Extensible Driver Interface (disclaimer: by me) that pandered to free software ideals by guaranteeing mere source compatibility but failed to gain a following in its tiny home community; and the Common Device Interface that has gained some currency in the German hobbyist OS-development community but has very little material available in English. If the Linux kernel developers went through these and picked any one of them to implement, it could not only increase the market share of Linux operating systems out in "the world" but serve the ideals of free, open software by giving to the OS research and hobbyist world a real, usable way to avoid the tedious drag of reimplementing device drivers for even the most primitive functionality on every single new OS.
Take it from someone who owned one: the OpenMoko was a terrible phone and a terrible handheld computer. It was nearly useless when not hooked up to a computer via SSH over USB. OpenMoko earned an A for vision in getting a fully open and documented hardware interface, although the results were dubious (crappy GPRS GSM modem in an era when 3G was just becoming popular, crappy non-accelerated drivers for the video chipset). However, OpenMoko's worst failing was the total inability of the company to push a singular stable and complete platform for development; there were about 20 different incompatible distributions in various states of disarray, and you cannot have a platform for end-user app development in that sort of environment. (Imagine how unsuccessful Apple's app store or Android's marketplace would be if developers and users had to choose between 20 different incompatible distributions, all in permanent alpha status...) I think I can live with a few proprietary blobs if it means having a useful device. All of the open technology in the world means nothing if the platform dies on the vine before ever taking off. OpenMoko's ideal of a fully open phone platform proved unsustainable, as the company canceled their "next-gen" (translation: 2.5G in an era of 3G) phone and switched to producing a ridiculous "WikiReader" device which contains no pesky radio or accelerated video modules.
After more than a year of trying to use it, I finally was overjoyed to get rid of my crappy Freerunner. On the other hand, even though my N800 does not have a cell radio, I still like to use it, and am strongly considering buying an N900. I think the OpenMoko was for people who love putting together distributions and blogging about how much freer their device is compared to everyone elses'. A platform like the N800/900 is for people who like programming mobile computers to accomplish useful tasks and then distributing those programs to non-programmers.
The preceding comments reflect the author's personal opinion and are public domain, unless explicitly stated otherwise.