FSO founds BGB company
We just released the following statement to various mailing lists:
Braunschweig, Germany, 2009-07-29. For immediate release.
The freesmartphone.org core-team founds a BGB company to facilitate the further development of free and open source middleware for Linux-based mobile systems: "Lauer, Lübbe, Schmidt, Willmann, freesmartphone.org GbR".
The core-team members of the freesmartphone.org project today announced the founding of a legal entity offering consulting, training, and implementation services around the freesmartphone.org middleware platform, also known as FSO.
"We now have a single point of contact for both commercial and non-commercial parties who want to use our services to create compelling solutions. This is of interest for groups or individuals creating new devices or freeing existing devices ("anti-vendor-ports") and who decided to incorporate the FSO middleware", says Dr. Michael Lauer, founder of the FSO project. "If you care about the further development of this platform or if you need guidance for tailoring or customizing the FSO middleware, contact us via E-Mail at coreteam\@freesmartphone.org".
With todays' smartphones evolving into ubiquituous companions, a gap has emerged between widely used FOSS components like the Linux kernel and core system libraries on one side, and end-user applications on the other side. The lack of a complete free mobile software stack hinders innovation and leads to reinventing proprietary solutions for services middleware.
FSO's mission is to close this gap by designing and developing solid middleware for mobile systems in an open fashion; this refers to not only publishing source code under open source licenses, but also to sharing the whole design and development process with the community and giving both commercial and non-commercial entities a way to co-drive and steer the process.
Built on top of the Linux kernel, FSO implements high level services for mobile application development, accessible via the DBus interprocess communication standard. Leveraging the FSO APIs allows the developer to concentrate on solving application domain problems, such as business logic and presentation of data, without having to worry about the device specifics and low level details, such as how to access resources, telephony, location awareness, data storage, etc.
*About freesmartphone.org: Previously funded by Openmoko Inc, freesmartphone.org is a collaboration platform for open source and open discussion software projects working on interoperability and shared technology for Linux-based smartphones. freesmartphone.org operates on the services layer (middleware) and offers APIs and reference implementations that support modern interconnected mobile devices. To provide reference solutions, freesmartphone.org works closely together with various device-specific communities such as the Openmoko, OpenEZX, and HTC-Linux groups. The FSO team honours and bases on specifications and software created by the freedesktop.org community.
- This means you can hire us (or donate money), if you want to support the FSO middleware development.
Updating the Recording Studio
Although I kept working on my instrument skills, I neglected my recording studio for about a decade now. I guess the root of the problem is that I never got the hang of the modern computer based sequencers. The moment when I sold my KORG 01/W workstation (almost a decade ago) was the moment I more or less quit recording anything.
While I'm working with computers for a living, I don't like software instruments much -- with one exception which is the reason for this post. I just acquired a Native Instruments MASCHINE -- which is a dedicated hardware controller for a software instruments (a groovebox, actually). This is slowly bringing back my motivation to do some recordings.
As part of this motivation, I sold some of the gear that only gathered dust, namely an Akai MPC 2500, a Roland JD990 w/ VintageKeys extensions, and a BitStream WaveIdea controller. Less is more and keyboardwise, I'm feeling very confident with only a Roland V-Synth GT and a Roland V-Piano now.
Stay tuned for some releases... after so many years :)
Dreambox 8000
After the sudden death of my Dreambox 7025, the new OE-based device in the living room is a Dreambox 8000 -- simply the best set top box money can buy these days. Yes, it's quite expensive, but the hardware is fully loaded (heck, there's even WiFi) and the freedom to install what you want is invaluable.
Openmoko Workshop in Munich
I'll be present at the first Openmoko Workshop in Munich, gracefully organized by Dr. N. Schaller (Goldelico) hosted at the University of applied science in Munich. Topics will be developer-oriented, but beginners are also invited. There are only few seats left, so please contact Dr. Schaller via the freeyourphone.de forum, if you want to be on board.
I'll be talking mainly about freesmartphone.org -- the beginning (2002-2008, from handhelds.org to openmoko.org), the present (2009, how to program with FSO), the future (2010-, what the Vala rewrite will bring and how we get FSO to more hardware).
This is just a loose gathering to get started. If there is sufficient interest, we will consider turning this into a more formal (professional) training course in the future. Hope to see you there!
POS will die
From everywhere you hear the whining and complaints of local points of sale that the internet is taking away their business foundation. Whenever I buy a new device, I try to countervail this effect by going to my local shop to buy it there instead of doing the couch potato buying it over the internet. However 9 out of 10 times I get disappointed by them not having what I want in stock. If I wanted to order it to get it later, I had ordered it online in the first place :(
This morning I went to a local shop to buy a new communications device with a contract -- these point of sales get quite a nice provision when people buy contracts. To my surprise, they had the device I wanted in stock and I felt growing excitement. Then I grabbed a piece of paper showing them a special employee rebate code I got from another employee and guess what... "oh, with these kinds of rebates devices can only be ordered at the support hotline"... WTF?
With this policy, points of sale will die -- it's inevitable. They are digging their own grave and I have no more symphathy.
LinuxTag 2009
I'm on my way to LinuxTag 2009. Instead of a "real booth" like last year, we settled on a developer table in the hacking area -- there we can present our Linux on mobile projects such as
in a more relaxed way -- giving room to dive into some technical issues, when interested folks come around.
Find me there, if you're interested in any of the aforementioned projects. I'll be there until Friday afternoon.
Sid Player 1.2.49
We have just submitted Sid Player 1.2.49 to Apple. Highlights of changes in this revision include:
- Author Tab: In offline mode, only show authors for which songs are available,
- Underrun Detection: Relax threshold a bit, add setting to turn it off completely (for you jailbreakers...),
- Settings Tab: Enable switching between multiple SID models,
- Files Database: Files are no longer stored on your filesystem, but in a database. This fixes the incredibly annoying iTunes synchronization times. NOTE that we had to wipe all your data during the upgrade to make this happen.
and finally the first step towards the #1 wanted feature...
- Added four playlists: "Favorites", "My Top 50 Played", "Random 100", "HVSC Top 100".
- Enable reordering all playlists and adding/removing songs from/to the "Favorites" list directly from the Player screen.
Although we wanted to ship more smaller updates, this one has become a major update and took us a while. I hope it gets past the review pretty fast, so you can enjoy our latest work!
NB: The newest iPhone 3G[S] excited us a lot, especially since we already max out CPU power on the current models. We're looking forward to enabling stereo and to add some nice post processing effects in a special Sid Player version once this model is out. Stay tuned!
NB2: Yes, we know that the HVSC team has released v50, however they have substituted a lot of PSID versions with RSID versions, which -- although they might sound better -- do no longer play given the limited CPU power of the iPhone and iPod Touch. I'm sorry, but until faster models appear, we can not ship the updated SIDs...
I'm in love
10 years of sound modelling research have just been unleashed:
Roland V-Piano. No Samples Inside!
Resigning from OE Core Team
I have just sent a mail to the OE core team that I'm resigning as a member of said "core team". I will also give up administration of mailing lists, my position as OpenEmbedded e.V. board member, and taking care about the git/web/etc. services machine.
I have been with OpenEmbedded since the beginning, together with Chris and Holger I founded it in 2002/2003, and although we had our ups and downs, over the years we always managed to keep the spirit of openness and friendlyness alive. However -- over the last 12 months, I have experienced some very unpleasant incidents in how certain members are treating other contributors, scaring them away, coldheartedly enforcing policies that are meant to be bendable guidelines, etc.
This is no longer a project where I feel my contributions are welcome. The core team failed to do its job as a moderate and balanced steering committee -- it is apathetic and just bows down to the will of the most vocal single indviduals. I'm utterly disappointed by the amount of carelessness.
Whether I will fork OE as a whole or maintain my own branch on the main server or somewhere else I have not decided yet.
Back from Switzerland
Just came back from Berne where the bi-annual OpenExpo was held. The OpenExpo is one of my favourite conferences, since it's very professionally organized, has a rich mix of interesting topics and talks while retaining the very friendly characteristic spirit of switzerland -- which I like a lot.
Sean Moss-Pultz from Openmoko Inc gave a talk in the "business" track, while I gave a talk in the "technology" track. Videos of both tracks are available here [actually, the business track is still missing, the technology track is already there though] -- please watch them before continuing reading. Sean "shocked" the world with a very honest retrospective and a description of the state of Openmoko right now, while I layed out the fragmented state of Linux on mobile and the way freesmartphone.org attempts to improve this situatin.
Most facts have been detailed elsewhere, so I will not just repeat these, but rather state what it means for the movement of Linux on open mobile devices.
Neo 1973 and the FreeRunner
There is absolutely no reason to worry about support for the existing devices. Both the Neo1973 and the FreeRunner are in pretty good shape these days and will be supported by the forthcoming operating system upgrade, Openmoko 2009. Plus you have access to half a dozen of community distributions. If you happen to be plagued by the gsm-buzz problem on the FreeRunner, please join one of the de-buzzing initiatives -- there will be multiple ones. Other than that, the FreeRunner and parts are still in stock in high numbers.
Openmoko, Inc.
I have been with Openmoko, Inc. since the beginning. In fact, I'm employee number #3, #2 being Harald 'LaF0rge' Welte, who quit in 2007, #1 being Sean Moss-Pultz himself. I'm sad that things needed to be put on hold, but there are no hard feelings whatsoever towards Openmoko. In fact, I hope that the new product will be a huge success (I will buy one or two), so that the open phone can be restarted -- and if so, I would not mind to be a part of it again.
freesmartphone.org
As the FSO team is now without funding, we will continue working on it in our spare time, as much as we did work before Openmoko came around. We will however, a) look for new funding and b) slightly change priorities to support more other hardware, like the HTC anti-vendor-ports. All of us 100% believe in the ideas of
- Free platforms for free people,
- Unified access to services and peripherals,
- Solving real user-problems and leveraging creativity through simple and powerful tools.
The Openmoko devices are and will remain our reference platform, since they're the only fully open ones. If you want to work on freeing more closed devices, be our guest! We are concentrating on middleware and helping application developers to create compelling applications based on the FSO middleware. We can not cover kernel support though. We will soon come up with a comprehensive table of FSO-compliance levels to indicate what level of support the FSO middleware expectes from the kernel. By that we hope to motivate anti-vendor-port communities (such as OpenEZX, Gnufiish, HTClinux) to uplevel their devices towards standard kernel interfaces and to establish more horizontal communication between those hardware-inspired communities.
Epilogue
Yes, Openmoko halting telephony is slowing the movement down. No, it's not killing it. Neither is it a sign that free software on mobile phones does not work or lacks demand. Many of us want free platforms. And no, Android is not it. Yes, it may be open enough for some people, and it may take lots of developers from Windows Mobile. But it does not bring more free hardware nor free infrastructure.
Cheers,
:M: