What that means for FOSS-lovers is clear… you can’t trust any company to continue working on anything. Business demands are what counts in the world of mass markets. If you want longterm support for a platform, your best bet is to build a community around it. But you will also want to work on hardware support otherwise you’ll run into the next dead end.

To be honest, right now I don’t see much of a future for any mobile Linux-inspired platform other than the mutation called Android. But that’s not much of a problem per se. The smartphone market is crazy. To compete in that world, you have to give up on freedom. But is the mass market really what we want? Is it what mobile Linux needs?

I don’t think so. There are still huge opportunities for using Linux-based mobile software platforms in niches such as machine2machine communication, home automation, research, teaching, and more. That’s where a service-based middleware like FSO comes into the game: for special interests. However, even niche-adoption is hindered without a minimal set of applications. And that is where we still lack: Even special interest people want to use their smartphones to manage contacts, browse the web, send mails, play media, etc. We don’t have an integrated software stack with a complete set of UI applications that would cover these needs. Openmoko worked on one, but failed. Nokia worked on multiple ones, but gave up (multiple times). What else do we have?

With HP’s recent announcement about releasing WebOS as open source, the game may have changed. If we could use the WebOS application stack on top of the FSO middleware, we may have a real chance to get something great and usable – and complete – soon. I have always liked the WebOS UI. If it’s a bit slower than other UIs, who cares as long as it is free?

The first bunch of weeks with the baby were really demanding. I mean, really. She screamed a lot and could only sleep in our arms. Boy, were we tired. We carried her around so much we have Schwarzenegger arms now. But it’s great to see her developing, err… growing up, of course. With 6 months now she is a very interested baby, eager to learn new things and always trying to become more mobile.

Luckily both my wife and me are self-employed. It so much easier when you can skip some hours at the usual start of the workday and also at the usual end. Of course, the work needs to be done, so we have to compensate when she’s in bed. But still, it’s very satisfying being able to see her twice a day for a couple of hours — not all families have this luxury. Plus the existence of our two invaluable grandmas… it’s great.

Company-wise, the Lauer & Teuber GbR had an amazing year with many interesting iOS (and some Android) projects. We have reached the maximum we can do with the two guys we are, so we decided to grow and hire our first regular employee who’s going to start in 2012. We also rented another office and are already moving.

I’m slowly getting back into some of my beloved open source projects… it’s great that work on e.g. FSO did not stall at all, but continued while I was “away”. Last week, I attended the 3rd installment of the Open Hard- and Software Workshop in munich, where the latest development of the very promising GTA04 mobile phone was presented. I had a talk about Vala which was well received. By the way, my Vala-book plans are not dead yet… just in parking position

Next week I’m attending the FSOSHRCON, a joined conference with the people working on the freesmartphone.org middleware and the SHR software. It’s going to be great seeing all the folks again, concentrating a full weekend to agree on some important issues laying the path forward for the next year. Can’t wait to be there.

What’s left is the feeling that an extremely busy year has passed by, spiced with incredibly intense emotions. I’m a happy man and I love my life. I’m given exciting opportunities, but also challenges – and I plan to accept everything

All the best to you guys!

Mummy was still on intensive care and so they gave her to me. I can’t express the feelings I had in this very moment. I’m still kind of overwhelmed every time I see her. Thanks for all of you who waited anxiously with me and those who prayed for us. The most important tasks for the near future is getting Mummy to recover and Lara Marie to become accustomed to us and the rest of the outside world.

Please bear with me if in the next time I’m not as responsive as usually

Guys, seeing this card was very heartwarming – it means a lot to me that you share my anticipation, thanks a lot! And I’m 100% sure she will appreciate her gifts… now let’s cross fingers it won’t take much longer… waiting is the hardest part of it

Yours,

Mickey.

It’s been a while on this blog, mainly due to the fact that many short status updates are better twittered than blogged. Then again, as promised / threatened in last year’s installment of this column, I had to spend most of the time this year with iOS development, rather than with FOSS — and it doesn’t look like this will change much (you know, food and things…). Still I do care a lot about projects like OpenEmbedded, Vala, freesmartphone.org, and the like, so here’s what has been going on this year:

OpenEmbedded (www.openembedded.org)

OE moved along quite well this year. I did not have much time for it — other than taking care about a couple of Vala and FSO recipes — but I’m especially pleased that the community finally embraced major clean up. Thanks to Frans, Richard, and all others involved, OE is improving heavily — although it wasn’t easy: Over the last couple of years, the OE core contributors developed a resistance against any changes affecting more than a handfull of recipes, however in order to make OE handle even more contributors and various use cases, we had to do some substantial cleanups. This will reduce maintenance and improve the overall quality of recipes in OE, which is the #1 complaint I hear.

Vala (www.vala-project.org)

During the first half of the year, Vala went through some extremely tiring phases of non-activity, which improved vastly when its main developers opened up a bit, i.e. giving more developers access to the tree, adding branches, etc. There have been many changes in the Dova profile, but also the GLib profile has seen an incredible amount of work, bugfixes, some new features, and more.

The pace of changes that affect basic things had also impact on my vala-book plans; apart from a severe lack of time on my side, I think it’s better to wait until Vala is closer to 1.0. Otherwise I risk describing a moving target, which — considering the time I have to work on that project — would effectively kill it. That said, it’s great to see that Vala is getting better every day and gains more and more popularity from all kinds of developers.

FSO (freesmartphone.org)

The progress on freesmartphone.org is two-fold; on one hand, we have seen quite a nice amount of work to support more devices. On the other hand though, in contrast to all the work I did in 2009, there has been a severe lack of development of the core in 2010. This I plan to change as soon as possible. For 2011, I see myself continuing to develop FSO in the following three dimensions; internal, external, and integration.

1. Internal | FSO is a heavy DBus consumer. I think by now we are one of the largest projects using DBus, at least considering the amount of API and running processes that communicate with each other via DBus. We always had our share of problems with DBus, especially some concurrency problems and race conditions are still haunting us. Both libdbus and dbus-glib exhibit their own share of problems, obviously this is not much of an issue on the desktop, but it turns out to be a major PITA on embedded systems, such as a phone. That’s why I have been excited since I heard that the glib team planned to write their own DBus backend and put it right into the glib. This work has now been released as of glib 2.26. Over the next weeks, I will port FSO to using gdbus in a branch.
2. External | DBus-signals have some problems. That’s why some big projects (BlueZ and ConnMan, to name two of them) adopted an agent-style of API, where the clients have to implement a server API which is being called by the actual servers. While this means some more work for client developers, it has major benefits. I’m going to change some of our APIs to adopt this style.
3. Integration | To deliver an integrated solution for today’s mobile phones, FSO needs to add more glue to work with existing services, such as BlueZ (bluetooth connectivity), Connman (ethernet and wifi connectivity), and some VoIP services. While these services work fine on their own, FSO lacks an API that uses these individual services in combination to achieve higher level tasks.

All this means that I will not be working much on the actual ports, but rather use my — very limited, did I say that yet? — time to drive the core forwards. I still believe that we will have full FOSS phones — other than the Openmoko devices — soon. Please help to make this dream a reality. (And no, please don’t talk to me about Android…)

Cheers,

:M:

Follow me, if you can

I have been watching Qt progressing though, and ever since they introduced Qt Kinetic and QML it became very interesting for me again. QML looks like EFL’s Edje been thought through — don’t get me wrong, Edje was groundbreaking (as most of Rasterman’s work) when it made its debut, however in my opinion it got stuck in the middle and never lived up to what I was expecting from it.

Once QML ships with Qt — hopefully in the next minor or at least major version of Qt, I will get back on doing some FOSS work on application level to complete creating a smart phone stack. That’s going to be fun!

Due to the short notice, we could not manage to create a video recording infrastructure, so I’m afraid this year we can only provide the slides — which are a notoriously bad substitute for real talks though. We try to improve for next year — if we can get a devroom again. The pictures you are seeing are courtesy Dr. Nikolaus Schaller from Goldelico, btw. — thanks!

The FOSDEM team did certainly improve its organization over the last years, I was very pleased to see some of my criticism being taken into account. Apart from the lack of good coffee in Brussels (which the FOSDEM team probably is unguilty for), I can’t complain about anything. Even WiFi worked tremendously well on saturday. I still think due to the size of the ever growing interest in this conference that the ULB as location should seriously be reconsidered though. The special service transport on sunday to the main station is a great idea, folks — thanks a lot! Funnily enough, half of the ICE that took me to/from Frankfurt/Main to Brussels Zuid was filled with hackers, btw.

I have met some interesting people working on mobile devices, such as dcordes, leviathan, GNUtoo, cr2, larsc, heinervdm, etc. It’s great to see there is still momentum in real mobile FOSS architectures (i.e. something besides the Android, Maemo, or WebOS systems). I’m glad to tell you that this year we will see an exciting breakthrough in freesmartphone.org middleware supporting new platforms, i.e. progress on the HTC Dream and the Palm Pre is looking _very_ well. Stay tuned for more details appearing here soon.

I wish every conference would be like that. The only slightly disappointing thing was the cross-buildsystem-session in the embedded room. Just when I was expecting the discussion about the problems and potential collaboration to start, the time for the session was over. Rather than wasting time watching Andy Green telling us that our projects will die soon and we should all start using Fedora/Embedded now, we could have had some progress… Oh well, perhaps next year.

Hope to see you there!

• devtmpfs — kernel support for the /dev file system
• dbus system activation — on-demand launching of dbus-based services

I’m going to carry out the following two tasks in OE:

1. Writing fso-boot, a small executable written in C, which mounts the filesystems, brings up DBus and (optionally) launches X11
2. Setting fso-boot as new init process, that way you still have sysvinit and udev in your root file system, but they’re not active unless explicitly asked for

I’ll do that for the freesmartphone.org adaptation for the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1, Google ADP-1), which I’m running on 2.6.32 (necessary for devtmpfs) — stay tuned for the first benchmarks.