The road ahead. From om 2008.8 to a working phone!

As many people already know, Openmoko has stopped (or at least reduced) their updates for the om 2008.9. That's because om 2008.9 is considered pretty usable. Don't get me or Openmoko wrong. They don't say om 2008.9 is stable.

Are they in hibernation now?
No, Openmoko is now putting effort into the 'base' image. That's an image only containing the settings and installer application. They want to build a rock solid base for om 2008.* and FSO. Because up till now, the changes that were made on the installer/settings or other lowlevel stuff had to be imported into the 2 stacks. They had to check if everything still worked and not all updates that went into om 2008.9 was available on FSO. So they ended up with 2 images and had to do almost everything twice.

There is another reason why the 'base' image was born. Because the FSO stack contains an framework for handling the gsm/bluetooth/audio/gps/network/..., it is meant to be merged into the om2008.* distribution. At that point all (or almost all) the qtopia stuff will be replaced with the backends of FSO. So that step is easier when the two (om 2008.* and FSO) already have the same base.

The road ahead...
In far dreams, Openmoko is trying to mix the framework of FSO into the 'om 2008.*' (That will be 'om 2009.*' at the time). So anyone who wants to make an application for the Neo FreeRunner, will have an easy library to speak to the underlying hardware. Then they will also remove all the qtopia stuff (because FSO and Qtopia would fight over the ownership of the hardware) and mix another frontend into it, that will be called Paroli.


ps. This post is an mix of everything I've read on the mailling lists, the chat and the wiki. So this is no opinion of Openmoko and Openmoko hasn't correct or helped with this post. So if you find any wrong assuptioms (What I doubt), please post a comment.