As promised, OpenMoko completely opened access to code, specifications, bugtracker, and mailing lists. This is an absolute novum in the industry, since — to my knowledge — no company ever published code and specifications during development state. This is even more open than Nokia — who released Maemo not before the first version was finished.

The OpenMoko team sees this as an open invitation to the community to contribute not only in the form of additions and refinements, but also on the core platform itself. We are gathering your input and are commited to get your wishes into the platform. There will be no closed branches, no internal forking whatsoever. This thing will stay open.

In the past couple of months, I have been working on the OpenMoko application framework, a set of GObject-derived classes, APIs and libraries for a rich and consistent application programming experience. Getting APIs right the first time is incredibly hard — especially when all you have is demo applications. I see this unfinished state as a great opportunity for all potential application programmer’s to tell us what kind of APIs they want to see in the framework.

I have been also trying to realize the designer’s idea of the OpenMoko look & feel. And guys… I have been going through hell. Designers are cool, but their attempt to applications is top-down, they think in terms of complete views including absolutely positioned UI elements. Whereas a programmer’s approach is bottom-up — thinking in terms of layout managers, widgets, composite engines, and the like. This cultural gap can be observed by comparing the various Mockups in the Wiki to actual screenshots. Due to the limitation of the both the current hardware (S3C2410 @ 266MHz) and the software (X/Gtk+) in the Neo1973, a lot of effects are just not efficiently recreatable. However, we will retain the Mockups in the Wiki, because they are the manifest of our goal. Eventually OpenMoko will run on faster hardware (Neo v2) and perhaps also a more suitable base toolkit (EFL, Clutter, pure Cairo?)– then we’ll get there.

In contrast to a lot of other companies opening their code, this is not the end, but the beginning. OpenMoko Inc. continues to support paid work on the OpenMoko platform, which is necessary to canalize and realize all the valuable input of the community. Although we were plagued by a lot of things going wrong during the past months (see Harald’s and Sean’s postings), things fall slowly into place now.

Shaping the age of liberated mobile computing — it’s an exciting time we live in.