RIP Openmoko

[swifty]

With a tear in my eye

Vorläufig kein weiteres Linux-Telefon - News Digital: Mobil - bernerzeitung.ch

[swifty]

and here for the english speaking:

Openmoko's FreeRunner, the original open source (hardware and software) Linux phone, made us oh so excited back in the day, before Android and the iPhone. And now it's dead. UPDATED.

Update: OpenMoko is actually only canceling their next phone. The current model, GTA02 will stay in production. Their next project is still going to be a non-phone gadget, so they're still effectively leaving the phone business for the time being.

They only sold around 10,000 FreeRunners. To survive, they're cutting their staff by 50 percent. Sad to see a pioneer of something ahead of its time wither and almost die like this.


Gizmodo - Openmoko Cancels FreeRunner GTA03, Quits Phone Business (for Now) - freerunner

[*~Nimsrules~*]

I thought they were still doing updates on that but well... Prayers for Openmoko's soul.

[shantanu]

oh this is the bad news for open moko

[swifty]

Sweetness. Looks like the FreeRunner is finally dead.

I’d just like to take a moment, and lament about all the top notch features we could have had with a truly open source phone like the FreeRunner.

* grep’ing through your address book using extended regular expressions
* finger’ing your Fav Five
* Having 10 different competing UI’s packaged by dozens of different distributions
* Being able to ssh to your phone so that you can check it’s uptime
* Using PGP to sign your SMS messages. Beware though, after the signature, you’ll only have 5 characters left to work with.
* Sending people videos in ogg theora format
* Losing data randomly with ext4
* Unloading the kernel module for the asterisk button because I never use it
* Changing your keypad to dvorak layout, where the most commonly used numbers are in the middle row
* Using gkrellm to monitor your battery power, as it is slowly sucked away by gkrellm
* More efficiently using your tiny screen with a tiling window manager
* Running only free and open javascript
* Warning users that their keypad lock password is not strong enough
* E17, some day. No, really, someday.

found there:
Linux Hater's Blog
BUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

[wyrm]

* using pgp to sign your sms messages. Beware though, after the signature, you’ll only have 5 characters left to work with.

lol!