an open phone from nokia ?

[geoffrey mendelson]

On Aug 30, 2009, at 11:52 AM, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
>
> In all honesty, I would rather have a phone that works than have a  
> phone that runs my applications. I am much more worried about  
> Android's lack of friendliness to third party applications (unless  
> they come through the Market) than I am about the fact it is running  
> a non-standard environment. I am sad to say that, in that respect,  
> Windows Mobile is better.


The iPhone is similar. While people say that the Mac is UNIX and it is  
very heavily BSD based, the average user has no contact with it. I  
have several terminal windows open, run X windows applications (on the  
Mac and from remote clients), etc. 99% of the users never open a  
terminal window, never use X windows (except for OpenOffice, which no  
longer uses it) and their only contact is with the GUI and the closed  
source (sub)systems it invokes.

The iPhone is the same type of thing, with a closed source GUI on top  
of a BSD kernel. The current iPhone uses an ARM processor, the  
development environment is X86 based, and while there is a  
compatability GUI, there is no X86 to ARM emulation. This does two  
things, one it forces the developer to test on the iPhone itself  
before release and two it makes a future device with an X86 processor  
will have a large library of tested applications.

Apple also took the path that Nintendo started with the Gameboy and  
Sony follows with the PSP. You can't sell an application for the  
iPhone without going to the Apple store. (look up Google voice and the  
iPhone for the details). According to a friend of mine who is an  
iPhone user, they can easily be "jailbroken" to allow you to run non  
approved applications, but how many people on the street will do it?

My point is that while Shachar states that Windows Mobile is a better  
development enviornment, and I think the iPhone is one too, this is a  
case where you have to decide if you want to develop a FOSS  
application or a closed one. 14 years ago when I started using Linux,  
it was a rare thing, even in free systems BSD was popular, and the GPL  
was something new and not common or understood. I think that the day  
after the iPhone is actually released to Israel, there will be 10,000  
startups started to make iPhone apps. So if you are looking for fame  
and fortune, fast return (or fast loss) of your efforts, go with the  
iPhone.

If you are looking to make a contribution to the FOSS family, look for  
a Linux based phone and stick with it.

Geoff.
-- 
geoffrey mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Jerusalem Israel geoffreymendelson at gmail.com