Open Source Phone on the Way

prostoalex writes "Dr. Dobb's Journal reports on GPE Palmtop Environment's aim to create a full stack of open source software for mobile phones. Mobile operator Orange and France Telecom are contributing to the project. The goal is to have a fully featured mobile handset with applications like instant messaging and email, with only a portion of the price."

Inevitable Commodity Item

[KrackHouse]

In five years when the hardware costs 38cents for these there is no doubt that vendors will avoid paying a hefty fee for the software or they won't be able to compete. I just hope Google gets around to building free wireless internet. Kids will not know what a phone is in 10 years.

Interesting thought

[Raul654]

I'm curious - would it be possible to tweak something like this to do end-to-end encryption? (To make sure certain government agencies with three letter acronyms aren't listening in). Something like fast symmetric key encryption, using Diffie-Hellman key exchange?

iPhone

[adambha]

With a nice piece of hardware like the iPhone this project could be 'toyed' with in many ways. Then again, it may not matter. [roughlydrafted.com]

And let's not forget that an open source project many not be the first choice for a top-dollar piece of hardware.

Re:reducing duplication of efforts?

[adfour]

Openmoko can be build on Openembedded, afaik, which can be run on your desktop-- be your own build server. Isn't that the whole idea?

Dup. And the first real Open Source effort.

[btarval]

Well, honestly, every year (over the past couple of years at least) has seen several companies or groups claiming to be the first Open Source cell phone effort.

The GPE project is no exception. They are predated by about a couple of years by OpenEZX [openezx.org]. It appears to have been around since 2005.

GPE might be bringing more applications to the party. And more P.R.. But they just aren't the first.

Oh, and this article is basically a dup of the previous announcement: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/05/ 130208 [slashdot.org]. Granted, this is a reposting from Dr. Dobbs. But it's basically the same info.

Last year, it was Trolltech. And as you note, it isn't fully open. Furthermore, it's closed in arguably the most critical fashion. Namely, the device driver. Unfortunately, Trolltech selected a Broadcom chip. And if you've ever worked with Broadcom, this is a very bad sign. Their software quality sucks big time. So there are probably buffer overflows and other problems in the driver which just won't ever get fixed.

Then there have been the Java phones that have been touting BS about being an "Open Source" phone (one of them actually won an award a year ago as an "Open Source" phone at JavaOne). The only thing Open Source is the application layer, not the OS or the low level hardware. But again, each of them issues a Press Release proclaiming to be the first Open Source phone, and the media gobbles it up.

I've forgotten the other claims. But every 6-12 months, there's yet another group and another announcement.

So, yes, this is a lot of hoopla. And IMHO, it's a discredit to the GPE group to be making this noise. They should be honest if they want credibility.

But IMHO, this is all yesterday's news. The most interesting thing currently going on is the Open Source Software and HARDWARE effort being done by The Homebrew Mobile Phone Club [slashdot.org]. The effort here is to release everything, including schematics, so that anyone can use COTS parts to build their own cellphone, from scratch.

But regardless of who was first, it is very nice to see all of these efforts going into finally opening up the cell phone market. This is a far cry from where things were 5 years ago.

Homebrew link

[Anonymous Coward]

The link you gave for the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club is broken, but here's a working one [hbmobile.org].

Hahahaha... *... not funny.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to post a joke about running Openoffice on my cellphone.

Come to think, I'm running it on a Pentium 166Mhz with 128MB RAM (yes, I'm not joking). Upgrade? Hah! I'm on the government (not in the US). It's that machine or a pencil. And yes, we have money. We just aren't allowed to spend it. Next time you say who uses still this or that so old machine, remember there must be someone in a poor underfunded government dept. using a 486.

Installing Linux is not an option, because there's a lot of in-house made, Windows-based legacy in the way...

So, yes, I really want to use Openoffice on my cellphone -- and a secure way to put it on my intranet...