Paul Boddie's Free Software-related blog

Back when I last wrote about the status of the Neo900 initiative, the fundraising had just begun and the target was a relatively modest €25000 by “crowdfunding” standards. That target was soon reached, but it was only ever the initial target: the sum of money required to prototype the device and to demonstrate that the device really could be made and could eventually be sold to interested customers. Thus, to communicate the further objectives of the project, the Neo900 site updated their funding status bar to show further funding objectives that go beyond mere demonstrations of feasibility and that also cover different levels of production.

So what happened here? Well, one of the slightly confusing things was that even though people were donating towards the project’s goals, it was not really possible to consider all of them as potential customers, so if 200 people had donated something (anything from, say, €10 right up to €5000), one could not really rely on them all coming back later to buy a finished device. People committing €100 or more might be considered as a likely purchaser, especially since donations of that size are effectively treated as pledges to buy and qualify for a rebate on a finished device, but people donating less might just be doing so to support the project. Indeed, people donating €100 or more might also only be doing so to support the project, but it is probably reasonable to expect that the more people have given, the more likely they are to want to buy something in the end. And, of course, if someone donates the entire likely cost of a device, a purchase has effectively been made already.

So even though the initiative was able to gauge a certain level of interest, it was not able to do so precisely purely by considering the amount of financial support it had been receiving. Consequently, by measuring donations of €100 or more, a more realistic impression of the scale of eventual production could be obtained. As most people are aware, producing things in sufficient quantity may be the only way that a product can get made: setup costs, minimum orders of components, and other factors mean that small runs of production are prohibitively expensive. With 200 effective pledges to buy, the initiative can move beyond the prototyping phase and at least consider the production phase – when they are ready, of course – without worrying too much that there will be a lack of customers.

Since my last report, media coverage has even extended into the technology mainstream, with Wired even doing a news article about it. Meanwhile, the project itself demonstrated mechanically compatible hardware and the modem hardware they intend to use, also summarising component availability and potential problems with the sourcing of certain components. For the most part, things are looking good indeed, with perhaps the only cloud on the horizon being a component with a 1000-unit minimum order quantity. That is why the project will not be stopping with 200 potential customers: the more people that jump on board, the greater the chances that everyone will be able to get a better configuration for the device.

If this were a mainstream “crowdfunding” effort, they might call that a “stretch goal”, but it is really a consequence of the way manufacturing is done these days, giving us economies of scale on the one hand, but raising the threshold for new entrants and independent efforts on the other. Perhaps we will eventually see innovations in small-scale manufacturing, not just in the widely-hyped 3D printing field, but for everything from electronic circuits to screens and cases, that may help eliminate some of the huge fixed costs and make it possible to design and make complicated devices relatively cheaply.

It will certainly be interesting to see how many more people choose to extend the lifespan of their N900 by signing up, or how many embrace the kind of smartphone that the “fickle market” supposedly does not want any more. Maybe as more people join in, more will be encouraged to join in as well, and so some kind of snowball effect might occur. Certainly, with the transparency shown in the project so far, people will at least be able to make an informed decision about whether they join in or not. And hopefully, we will eventually see some satisfied customers with open hardware running Free Software, good to go for another few years, emphasizing once again that the combination is an essential ingredient in a sustainable technological society.

Having mentioned the Neo900 smartphone initiative previously, it seems pertinent to note that it has moved beyond the discussion phase and into the fundraising phase. Compared to the Ubuntu Edge, the goals are fairly modest – 25000 euros versus tens of millions of dollars – but the way this money will be spent has been explained in somewhat more detail than appeared to be the case for the Ubuntu Edge. Indeed, the Neo900 initiative has released a feasibility study document describing the challenges confronting the project: it contains a lot more detail than the typical “we might experience some setbacks” disclaimer on the average Kickstarter campaign page.

It’s also worth noting that as the Neo900 inherits a lot from the GTA04, as the title of the feasibility study document indicates when it refers to the device as the “GTA04b7”, and as the work is likely to be done largely within the auspices of the existing GTA04 endeavour, the fundraising is being done by Golden Delicious (the originators of the GTA04) themselves. From reading the preceding discussion around the project, popular fundraising sites appear to have conditions or restrictions that did not appeal to the project participants: Kickstarter has geographical limitations (coincidentally involving the signatory nations of the increasingly notorious UKUSA Agreement), and most fundraising sites also take a share of the raised funds. Such trade-offs may make sense for campaigns wanting to reach a large audience (and who know how to promote themselves to get prominence on such sites), but if you know who your audience is and how to reach them, and if you already have a functioning business, it could make sense to cut the big campaign sites out of the loop.

It will certainly be interesting to see what happens next. An Openmoko successor coming to the rescue of a product made by the mobile industry’s previously most dominant force: that probably isn’t what some people expected, either at Openmoko or at that once-dominant vendor.

Hugo complains about Dell playing around with hardware specifications on their Ubuntu-based laptop products. (Hugo has been raising some pretty interesting issues, lately!)

I think that one reason why Dell was dropped from the Hardware Vendors page on the FSFE Fellowship Wiki was that even though Dell was promoting products with GNU/Linux pre-installed, actually finding them remained a challenge involving navigating through page after page of “Dell recommends Windows Vista/Windows 8/Windows Whatever” before either finding a low-specification and overpriced afterthought of a product or the customer just giving up on the whole idea.

Every time they “embrace Linux” I’d like to think that Dell are serious – indeed, Dell manages to support enterprise distributions of GNU/Linux on servers and workstations, so they can be serious, making their antics somewhat suspiciously incompetent at the “home and small office” level – but certainly, the issue of the changing chipset is endemic: I’m pretty sure that a laptop I had to deal with recently didn’t have the advertised chipset, and I tried as hard as possible to select the exact model variant, knowing that vendors switch things out “on the quiet” even for the same model. On that occasion, it was Lenovo playing around.

The first thing any major vendor should do to be taken seriously is to guarantee that if they sell a model with a specific model number then it has a precise and unchanging specification and that both the proper model number and the specification are publicly advertised. Only then can we rely on and verify claims of compatibility with our favourite Free Software operating systems.

Until then, I can only recommend buying a system from a retailer who will stand by their product and attempt to ensure that it will function correctly with the Free Software of your choice, not only initially but also throughout a decent guarantee period. Please help us maintain the Hardware Vendors page and to support vendors and retailers who support Free Software themselves.

(Note to potential buyers and vendors: the Hardware Vendors page does not constitute any recommendation or endorsement of products or services, nor does the absence of any vendor imply disapproval of that vendor’s products. The purpose of the page is to offer information about available products and services based on the experiences and research of wiki contributors, and as such is not a marketplace or a directory where vendors may request or demand to be represented. Indeed, the best way for a vendor to be mentioned on that page is to coherently and consistently offer products that work with Free Software and that satisfy customer needs so that someone may feel happy enough with their purchase that they want to tell other people about it. Yes, that’s good old-fashioned service being recognised and rewarded: an unusual concept in the modern world of business, I’m sure.)

The inside of some random Dell computer at a former workplace - this one may not have been running GNU/Linux, but my Dell workstation was

The Ben NanoNote is a pocket computer with a 3-inch screen and organiser-style keyboard announced in 2010 as the first in a line of copyleft hardware products under the Qi-Hardware umbrella: an initiative to collaboratively develop open hardware with full support for Free Software. With origins as an existing electronic dictionary product, the Ben NanoNote was customised for use as a general-purpose computing platform and produced in a limited quantity, with plans for successors that sadly did not reach full production.

The Ben NanoNote with illustrative beverage (not endorsed by anyone involved with this message, all trademarks acknowledged, call off the lawyers!)

When the Ben (as it is sometimes referred to in short form) first became known to a wider audience, many people focused on those specifications common to most portable devices sold today: the memory and screen size, what kind of networking it has (or doesn’t have). Some people wondered what the attraction was of a device that wasn’t wireless-capable when supposedly cheaper wireless communicator devices could be obtained. Even the wiki page for the Ben has only really prominently promoted the Free Software side of the device, mentioning its potential for making customised end-user experiences, and as an appliance for open content or for music and video playback.

Certainly, the community around the Ben has a lot to be proud of with regard to Free Software support. A perusal of the Qi-Hardware news page reveals the efforts to make sure that the Ben was (and still is) completely supported by Free Software drivers within the upstream Linux kernel distribution. With a Free Software bootloader, the Ben is probably one of the few devices that could conceivably get some kind of endorsement for the complete absence of proprietary software, including firmware blobs, from organisations like the FSF who naturally care about such things. (Indeed, a project recommended by the FSF whose output appears to be closely related to the Ben’s default software distribution publishes a short guide to installing their software on the Ben.)

But not everybody focused only on the software upon learning about the device: some articles covered the full range of ambitions and applications anticipated for the Ben and for subsequent devices in the NanoNote series. And work got underway rather quickly to demonstrate how the Ben might complement the Arduino range of electronics prototyping and experimentation boards. Although there were concerns that the interfacing potential of the Ben might be a bit limited, with only USB peripheral support available via the built-in USB port (thus ruling out the huge range of devices accessible to USB hosts), the alternatives offered by the device’s microSD port appear to offer a degree of compensation. (The possibility of using SDIO devices had been mentioned at the very beginning, but SDIO is not as popular as some might have wished, and the Ben’s microSD support seems to go only as far as providing MMC capabilities in hardware, leaving out desirable features such as hardware SPI support that would make programming slightly easier and performance substantially better. Meanwhile, some people even took the NanoNote platform to a different level by reworking the Ben, freeing up connections for interfacing and adding an FPGA, but the resulting SIE device apparently didn’t make it beyond the academic environments for which it was designed.)

Thus, the Universal Breakout Board (UBB) was conceived: a way of “breaking out” or exposing the connections of the microSD port to external devices whilst communicating with those devices in a different way than one would with SD-based cards. Indeed, the initial impetus for the UBB was to investigate whether the Ben could be interfaced to an Ethernet board and thus provide dependency-free networking (as opposed to using Ethernet-over-USB to a networked host computer or suitably configured router). Sadly, some of those missing SD-related features have an impact on performance and practicality, but that doesn’t stop the UBB from being an interesting avenue of experimentation. To distinguish between SD-related usage and to avoid trademark issues, the microSD port is usually referred to as the 8:10 port in the context of the UBB.

The Universal Breakout Board that plugs into the 8:10 (microSD) slot

(The UBB image originates from Qi-Hardware and is CC-BY-SA 3.0 licensed.)

Interfacing in Comfort

A lot of experimentation with computer-controlled electronics is done using microcontroller solutions like those designed and produced by Arduino, whose range of products starts with the modestly specified Arduino Uno with an ATmega328 CPU providing 32K (kilobytes) of flash memory and 2K of “conventional” static RAM (SRAM). Such specifications sound incredibly limiting, and when one considers that many microcomputers in 1983 – thirty years ago – had at least 32K of “conventional” readable and writable memory, albeit not all of it being always available for use on some machines, devices such as the Uno do not seem to represent much of an advance. However, such constraints can also be liberating: programs written to run in such limited space on the “bare metal” (there being no operating system) can be conceptually simple and focus on very specific interfacing tasks. Nevertheless, the platform requires some adjustment, too: data that will not be updated while a program runs on the device must be packed away in the flash memory where it obviously cannot be changed, and data that the device manipulates or collects must be kept within the limits of the precious SRAM, bearing in mind that the program stack may also be taking up space there, too.

As a consequence, the Arduino platform benefits from a vibrant market in add-ons that extend the basic boards such as the Uno with useful capabilities that in some way make up for those boards’ deficiencies. For example, there are several “shield” add-on products that provide access to SD cards for “data logging“: essential given that the on-board SRAM is not likely to be able to log much data (and is volatile), and given that the on-board flash memory cannot be rewritten during operation. Other add-ons requiring considerable amounts of data also include such additional storage, so that display shields will incorporate storage for bitmaps that might be shown on the display: the Arduino TFT LCD Screen does precisely this by offering a microSD slot. On the one hand, the basic boards offer only what people really need as the foundational component of their projects, but this causes add-on designers to try and remedy the lack of useful core functionality at every turn, putting microSD or SD storage on every shield or extension board just because the user might not have such capabilities already.

Having said all this, the Arduino platform generally only makes you pay for what you need, and for many people this is interesting enough that it explains Arduino’s continuing success. Nevertheless, for some activities, the Arduino platform is perhaps too low-level and to build and combine the capabilities one might need for a project – to combine an Arduino board with numerous shields and other extensions – would be troublesome and possibly unsatisfactory. At some point, one might see the need to discard the “form factor” of the Arduino and to use the technological building blocks that comprise the average Arduino board – the microcontroller and other components – in order to make a more integrated, more compact device with the additional capabilities of choice. For instance, if one wanted to make a portable music player with Arduino, one could certainly acquire shields each providing a screen and controls (and microSD slot), headphone socket and audio playback (and microSD slot), and combine them with the basic board, hoping that they are compatible or working round any incompatibilities by adding yet more hardware. And then one would want to consider issues of power, whether using a simple battery-to-power-jack solution would be good enough or whether there should be a rechargeable battery with the necessary power circuit. But the result of combining an Arduino with shields would not be as practical as a more optimised device.

The Arduino Duemilanove attached to a three-axis accelerometer breakout board

The Opportunity

In contrast to the “bare metal” approach, people have been trying and advocating other approaches in recent times. First of all, it has been realised that many people would prefer the comfort of their normal computing environment, or at least one with many of the capabilities they have come to expect, to a very basic environment that has to be told to run a single, simple program that needs to function correctly or be made to offer some rudimentary support for debugging when deployed. Those who promote solutions like the Raspberry Pi note that it runs a desktop operating system, typically GNU/Linux, and thus offers plenty of facilities for writing programs and running them in pleasant ways. Thus, interfacing with other hardware becomes more interactive and easier to troubleshoot, and it might even permit writing interfacing programs in high-level languages like Python as opposed to low-level languages like C or assembly language. In effect, the more capable platform with its more generous resources, faster processor and a genuine operating system provide opportunities that a microcontroller-based solution just cannot provide.

If this was all that were important then we would surely have reached the end of the matter, but there is more to consider. The Raspberry Pi is really a desktop computer replacement: you plug in USB peripherals and a screen and you potentially have a replacement for your existing x86-based personal computer. But it is in many ways only as portable and as mobile as the Arduino, and absolutely less so in its primary configuration. Certainly, people have done some interesting experiments adding miniature keyboards and small screens to the Raspberry Pi, but it starts to look like the situation with the Arduino when trying to build up some capability or other from too low a starting point. Such things are undoubtedly achievements in themselves, and like climbing a mountain or going into space, showing that it could be done is worthy of our approval, but just like those great achievements it would be a shame to go to all that effort without also doing a bit of science in the process, would it not?

An e-paper display connected to the Ben NanoNote via a cable and the Sparkfun "microSD Sniffer" board

This is where the Ben enters the picture. Because it is a pocket computer with a built-in screen and battery (and keyboard), you can perform various mobile experiments without having to gear up to be mobile in the first place. Perhaps most of the time, it may well be sitting on your desk next to a desktop computer and being remotely accessed using a secure shell connection via Ethernet-over-USB, acting as a mere accessory for experimentation. An example of this is a little project where I connected an e-paper screen to the Ben to see how hard it would be to make that screen useful. Of course, I could also take this solution “on the road” if I wanted, and it would be largely independent of any other computing infrastructure, although I will admit to not having run native compilers on the Ben myself – everything I have compiled has actually been cross-compiled using the OpenWrt toolchain targeting the Ben – but it should be possible to develop on the road, too.

But for truly mobile experimentation, where having an untethered device is part of the experiment, the Ben offers something that the Raspberry Pi and various single-board computer solutions do not: visualisation on the move. One interesting project that pioneered this is the UBB-LA (UBB Logic Analyzer) which accepts signals via the Ben’s 8:10 port and displays a time-limited capture of signal data on the screen. One area that has interested me for a while has been that of orientation and motion sensor data, with the use of gyroscopes and accelerometers to determine the orientation and motion of devices. Since there are many “breakout boards” (small boards providing convenient access to components) offering these kinds of sensors, and since the communication with these sensors is within the constraints of the 8:10 port bandwidth, it became attractive to use the Ben to prototype some software for applications which might use such data, and the Ben’s screen provides a useful way of visualising the interpretation of the data by the software. Thus, another project was conceived that hopefully provides the basis for more sophisticated experiments into navigation, interaction and perhaps even things like measurement.

The Pololu MinIMU-9 board connected to the Ben NanoNote in a horizontal position, showing the orientation information from the board

The Differentiator

Of course, sensor applications are becoming commonplace due to the inclusion of gyroscopes, accelerometers, magnetometers and barometers into smartphones. Indeed, this was realised within the open hardware community several years ago with the production of the Openmoko Freerunner Navigation Board that featured such sensors and additional interfacing components. Augmented reality applications and fancy compass visualisations are becoming standard features on smartphones, complementing navigation data from GPS and comparable satellite navigation systems, and the major smartphone software vendors provide APIs to access such components. Indeed, many of the components used in smartphones feature on the breakout boards mentioned above, unsurprisingly, because their cost has been driven down and made them available and affordable for a wider range of applications.

So what makes the Ben NanoNote interesting when you could just buy a smartphone and code against, say, the Android API? Well, as many people familiar with software and hardware freedom will already know, being able to use an API is perhaps only enough if you never intend to improve the software providing that API, or share that software and any improvements you make to it with others, and if you never want to know what the code is really doing, anyway. Furthermore, you may not be able to change or upgrade that software or to deploy your own software on a smartphone you have bought, despite vigorous efforts to make this your right.

Even if you think that the software providers have done a good job interpreting the sensor data and translating it into something usable that a smartphone application might use, and this is not a trivial achievement by any means, you may also want to try and understand how the device interacts with the sensors at a lower level. It is rather likely that an Android smartphone, for example, will communicate with an accelerometer using a kernel module that resides in the upstream Linux kernel source code, and you could certainly take a look at that code, but as thirty years of campaigning for software freedom has shown, taking a look is not as good as improving, sharing and deploying that code yourself. Certainly, you could “root” your smartphone and install an alternative operating system that gives you the ability to develop and deploy kernel modules and even user-space code – normal programs – that access the different sensors, but you take your chances doing so.

Meanwhile, the Ben encourages experimentation by letting you re-flash the bootloader and operating system image, and you can build your own kernel and root filesystem populated with programs of your choice, all of it being Free Software and doing so using only Free Software. Things that still surprise people with modified smartphone images like being able to log in and get a secure shell session and to run “normal Linux programs” are the very essence of the Ben. It may not have wireless or cellular networking as standard – a much discussed topic that can be solved in different ways – but that can only be good news for the battery life.

The Successor?

“What would I use it for?” That might have been my first reaction to the Ben when I first heard about it. I don’t buy many gadgets – my mobile telephone is almost ten years old – and I always try to justify gadget purchases, perhaps because growing up in an age where things like microcomputers were appearing but were hardly impulse purchases, one learns how long-lived technology products can be when they are made to last and made to a high quality: their usefulness does not cease merely because a new product has become available. Having used the Ben, it is clear that although its perceived origins as some kind of dictionary, personal organiser or music player are worthy in themselves, it just happens to offer some fun as a platform for hardware experimentation.

I regard the Ben as something of a classic. It might not have a keyboard that would appeal to those who bought Psion organiser products at the zenith of that company’s influence, and its 320×240 screen seems low resolution in the age of large screen laptops and tablets with “retina” displays, but it represents something that transcends specifications and yet manages to distract people when they see one. Sadly, it seems likely that remaining stocks will eventually be depleted and that opportunities to acquire a new one will therefore cease.

Plans for direct successors of the Ben never really worked out, although somewhat related products do exist: the GCW-Zero uses an Ingenic SoC just like the Ben does, and software development for both devices engages a common community in many respects, but the form factor is obviously different. The Pandora has a similar form factor and has a higher specification but also has a higher price, but it is apparently not open hardware. The Neo900, if it comes to pass (and it hopefully will), may offer a good combination of Free Software and open hardware, but it will understandably not come cheap.

One day, well-funded organisations may recognise and reward the efforts of the open hardware pioneers. Imitating aspirational product demonstrations and trying to get in on the existing action is all very well, not to mention going your own way, but getting involved in the open hardware communities and helping them to build new things would benefit everybody. I can only hope that such organisations come to their senses soon so that more people can have the opportunity to play with sensors, robotics and all the other areas of hardware experimentation, and that a healthy diversity of platforms may be sustained to encourage such experimentation long into the future.

The Ben NanoNote and regular-sized desktop computer accessories

Ever since the withdrawal of Openmoko from open smartphone development, it appears to have been challenging to find large numbers of people who might be interested in supporting similar open hardware efforts, either by having them put down money to fund the development and production of devices, or by encouraging them to develop Free Software to run on the hardware produced by those efforts. That anyone can go and buy an Android phone and tell themselves that it is just like that dream they once had of running Linux on a phone (if they turn the lights down low enough and ignore the technical and ethical limitations) serves as just enough of a distraction to keep people merely curious about things like Openmoko and open hardware, persuading them to hold off supporting such things until everybody else has jumped on board and already made it a safe choice. It almost goes without saying that where risk-takers are needed to make something happen, that thing is not going to happen if everybody looks to everybody else to take the risk. (And even when people do take the risk, they seem to think that their pledges and donations are as good as money in the bank, but that is another story.)

Naturally, the Ubuntu Edge campaign showed that some money is floating around and can be attracted to suitably exciting projects. Unfortunately, one may be tempted to conclude that anything more mundane than a next generation product – one that can only be delivered at some point in the future, once it becomes feasible and economic to manufacture and sell something with “out of this world” specifications – is unlikely to attract the interest of potential customers with money to pledge towards something. Such potential customers surely want something their money cannot already buy, and offering only things like openness and freedom as enhancements to today’s specifications is perhaps not exciting enough for some of those people.

It is therefore rather refreshing that two communities have recently become more aware of the possibilities offered by, and available to, open hardware: the OpenPhoenux community with their ongoing GTA04 project to follow on from the work of Openmoko, and the Maemo community seeking a sustainable future beyond the now-discontinued Nokia N900 smartphone. Despite heroic efforts to sustain the GTA04 project, outside interest has apparently been low enough that additional production has been placed on hold: a minimum number of orders needs to exist before any kind of further manufacturing can take place. Meanwhile, a community of people whose devices may one day fail to function or perhaps no longer function already, forcing them to seek replacements in the second-hand market with all the usual online auction profiteering and the purchasing uncertainties that go along with it, have been made aware of an active hardware project whose foundations largely resemble those of the devices they wish to sustain.

So, unlike Ubuntu Edge, the Neo900 initiative is not offering next year’s hardware. In fact, it is not even offering this year’s hardware. But what it does offer is a sustainable path into the future for those who like the form factor and software provided by the N900: people who were having to come to terms with buying a device that would not be as satisfactory as the one they already have, merely because the device they already have has reached the end of its usable life, and because the mobile device industry has a different idea of progress from the one they happen to have. In effect, the Neo900 is about taking control, owning the roadmap, deciding when or whether the fads and fashions of the industry at large will serve them better, and being able to choose or to reject the wider industry’s offerings on a more reasonable timescale.

The N900, as a product abandoned some time ago by Nokia as it retreated into being a vassal state of the Microsoft empire, gets an opportunity to rise from the ashes of the ruin wrought by the establishment of that corporate relationship. At a time where Nokia sees its core business incorporated into Microsoft itself in the final chapter of what has to be one of the most widely predicted and reported acts of alleged corporate looting in recent years, and where former Nokia executives announce plans to re-establish the business independently by attracting neglected Nokia talent, the open phoenix in the form of OpenPhoenux may help the N900 to rise above its troubled past and to shine once again as its former custodians struggle with the mayhem of corporate integration or corporate reconstruction, depending on where they end up.

People might wonder why anyone would want more of the same rather than something new, different, exciting, shiny. The fact is that away from the noise of exhibition floor, trade show and developer conference demonstrations, most people just want something that works and, preferably, something they already know. Their life goes on and does not wait for them to have to learn the latest gestures and moves to make some new gadget do what their old gadget was doing before it broke down. Some people – those with an N900 or those who wanted one – now have a new opportunity available to them, thanks to open hardware and the Neo900 initiative. For the rest of us, it offers more choice and maybe some hope that open hardware will be able to cater to more people in times to come.

The idea of a smartphone supportive of Free Software, using hardware that can be supported using Free Software, goes back a few years. Although the Openmoko Neo 1973 attracted much attention back in 2007, not only for its friendliness to Free Software but also for the openness around its hardware design, the Trolltech Greenphone had delivered, almost a full year before the Neo, a hardware platform that ran mostly Free Software and was ultimately completely supported using entirely Free Software (something that had been a matter of some earlier dispute). Unfortunately, both of these devices were discontinued fairly quickly: the Greenphone was more a vehicle to attract interest in the Qt-based Qtopia environment amongst developers, existing handset manufacturers and operators, and although the Neo 1973 was superseded by the Neo FreeRunner, the commercial partner of the endeavour eventually chose to abandon development of the platform and further products of this nature. (Openmoko now sells a product called WikiReader, which is an intriguing concept in itself, principally designed as an offline reader for Wikipedia.)

What survived the withdrawal of Openmoko from the pursuit of the Free Software smartphone was the community or communities around such work, having taken an active interest in developing software for such devices and having seen the merits of being able to influence the design of such devices through the principles of open hardware. Some efforts were made to continue the legacy: the GTA04 project develops and offers replacement hardware for the FreeRunner (known as GTA02 within the Openmoko project) using updated and additional components; a previous “gta02-core” effort attempted to refine the development process and specification of a successor to the FreeRunner but did not appear to produce any concrete devices; a GTA03 project which appeared to be a more participative continuation of the previous work, inviting the wider community into the design process alongside those who had done the work for the previous generations of Neo devices, never really took off other than to initiate the gta02-core effort, perhaps indicating that as the commercial sponsor’s interest started to vanish, the community was somewhat unreasonably expected to provide the expertise withdrawn by the sponsor (which included a lot of the hardware design and manufacturing expertise) as well as its own. Nevertheless, there is a degree of continuity throughout the false starts of GTA03 and gta02-core through to GTA04 and its own successes and difficulties today.

Then and Now

A lot has happened in the open hardware world since 2007. Platforms like Arduino have become very popular amongst electronics enthusiasts, encouraging the development of derivatives, clones, accessories and an entire marketplace around experimentation, prototyping and even product development. Other long-established microcontroller-based solution vendors have presumably benefited from the level of interest shown towards Arduino and other “-duino” products, too, even if those solutions do not give customers the right to copy and modify the hardware as Arduino does with its hardware licensing. Access to widely used components such as LCD panels has broadened substantially with plenty of reasonably priced products available that can be fairly easily connected to devices like the Arduino, BeagleBoard, Raspberry Pi and many others. Even once-exotic display technologies like e-paper are becoming accessible to individuals in the form of ready-to-use boards that just plug into popular experimenter platforms.

Meanwhile, more sophisticated parts of the open hardware world have seen their own communities develop in various ways. One community emerging from the Openmoko endeavour was Qi-Hardware, supported by Sharism who acquired the rights to produce the Ben NanoNote from the vendor of an existing product, thus delivering a device with completely documented electronics hardware, every aspect of which can be driven by Free Software. Unfortunately, efforts to iterate on the concept stalled after attempts to make improved revisions of the Ben, presumably in preparation to deliver future versions of the NanoNote concept. Another project founded under the Qi-Hardware umbrella has been extending the notion of “copyleft hardware” to system on a chip (SoC) solutions and delivering the Milkymist platform in the shape of the Milkymist One video synthesizer. Having dealt with commercially available but proprietary SoC solutions, such as the SoC used in the Ben NanoNote, there appears to be a desire amongst some to break free of the dependency on silicon vendors and their often poorly documented products and to take control not only of the hardware using Free Software tools, but also to decide how the very hardware platform itself is designed and built.

There are plenty of other hardware development initiatives taking place – OpenPandora, the EOMA-68 initiative, the Vivaldi KDE tablet (which is now going to be based on EOMA-68 hardware), the Novena open laptop – many of which have gained plenty of experience – sometimes very hard-earned experience – in getting hardware designed and produced. Indeed, the history of the Vivaldi initiative seems to provide a good illustration of how lessons that others have already learned are continuing to be learned independently: having negotiated manufacturing whilst suffering GPL-violating industry practices, the manufacturer changed the specification and rendered a lot of the existing work useless (presumably the part supporting the hardware with Free Software drivers).

In short, if you are considering designing a device “to run Linux”, the chances are that someone else is already doing just that. When people suggest that you look at various other projects or initiatives, they are not doing so to inflate the reputation of those projects: it is most likely the case that people associated with those projects can give you advice that will save you time and effort, even if there is no further collaboration to be had beyond exchanges of useful information.

The Competition for Attention

Ubuntu Edge – the recently announced, crowd-funded “dockable” smartphone – emerges at a time when there are already many existing open hardware projects in need of funding. Those who might consider supporting such worthy efforts may be able to afford supporting more than one of them, but they may find it difficult to justify doing so. Precious few details exist of the hardware featured in the Ubuntu Edge product, and it would be reasonable to suspect given the emphasis on specifications and features that it will not be open hardware. Moreover, given the tendency of companies wishing to enter the smartphone market to do so as conveniently as possible by adopting the “chipset of the month”, combined with the scarcity of silicon favouring true Free Software support, we might also suspect that the nature of the software support will be less than what we should be demanding: the ability to modify and maintain the software in order to use the hardware indefinitely and independently of the vendor.

Meanwhile, other worthy projects beyond the open hardware realm compete for the money of potential sponsors and donors. The Fairphone initiative has also invited people to pledge money towards the delivery of devices, although in a more tangible fashion than Ubuntu Edge, with genuine plans having been made for raw materials sourcing and device manufacture, and with software development supposedly undertaken on behalf of the project. As I noted previously, there are some unfortunate shortcomings with the Fairphone initiative around the openness of the software, and unless the participants are able to change the mindset of the chipset vendor and the suppliers of various technologies incorporated into the chipset, sustainable Free Software support may end up being dependent on reverse-engineering efforts. Mozilla’s Firefox OS, meanwhile, certainly emphasises a Free Software stack along with free and open standards, but the status of the software support for certain hardware functions are likely to be dependent on the details of the actual devices themselves.

Interest in open phones is not new, nor even is interest in “dockable” smartphones, and there are plenty of efforts to build elements of both while upholding Free Software support and even the principles of open hardware. Meanwhile, the Ubuntu Edge campaign provides no specifics about the details of the hardware; it is thus unable to make any commitment about Free Software drivers or binary firmware “blobs”. Maybe the intention is to one day provide things like board layouts and case designs as resources for further use and refinement by the open hardware community, but the recent track-record of Canonical and Ubuntu with secretive and divisive – or at least not particularly transparent or cooperative – product development suggests that this may be too much to hope.

Giving the Gift

$32 million is a lot of money. Broken into $600 chunks with the reward of the advertised device, or a consolation prize of your money back minus a few percent in fees and charges if the fund-raising campaign fails to reach its target, it is a lot of money for an individual, too. (There is also the worst-case eventuality that the target is met but the product is not delivered, at which point everybody might have found that they have merely made a donation towards a nice but eventually unrealisable or undeliverable idea.) One could do quite a bit of good work with even small multiples of $600, and with as much as around 0.5% of the Ubuntu Edge campaign target, one could fund something like the GCW Zero. That might not aggressively push back the limits of mobile technology on every front, but it gives people something different and valuable to them while still leaving plenty of money floating around looking for a good cause.

But it is not merely about the money, even though many of those putting down money for the Ubuntu Edge are likely to have ruled out doing the same for the Fairphone (and perhaps some of those who have ordered their Fairphone regret placing their order now that the Ubuntu Edge has made its appearance), purely because they neither need nor can reasonably afford or justify buying two new smartphones for delivery at some point in the future. The other gift that could be given is collaboration and assistance to the many projects already out there toiling to put Linux on some SoC or other, developing an open hardware design for others to use and improve, and deepening community expertise that might make these challenges more tolerable in the future.

Who knows how the Ubuntu Edge will be developed if or when the funding target is reached, or regardless of it being reached? But imagine what it would be like if such generosity could be directed towards existing work and if existing and new projects were able to work more closely with each other; if the expertise in different projects could be brought in to make some new endeavour more likely to succeed and less fraught with problems; if communities were included, encouraged to participate, and encouraged to take their own work further to enrich their own project and improve any future collaborations.

Investing, not Purchasing

$32 million is a lot of money. Less exciting things (to the average gadget buyer) like the OpenRISC funding drive to produce an ASIC version of an open hardware SoC wanted only $250000 – still a lot of money, but less than 1% of the Ubuntu Edge campaign target – and despite the potential benefits for both individuals and businesses it still fell far short of the mark, but if such projects were funded they might open up opportunities that do not exist now and would probably still not exist if Ubuntu got their product funded. And there are plenty of other examples where donations are more like investments in a sustainable future instead of one-off purchases of nice-looking gadgets.

Those thinking about making a Free Software phone might want to check in with the GTA04 project to see if there is anything they can learn or help out with. Similarly, that project could perhaps benefit from evaluating the EOMA-68 initiative which in turn could consider supporting genuinely open SoCs (and also removing the uncertainty about patent assertion for participants in the initiative by providing transparent governance mechanisms and not relying on the transient goodwill of the current custodians). As expertise is shared and collaboration increases, the money might start to be spread around a bit more as well, and cash-starved projects might be able to do things before those things become less interesting or even irrelevant because the market has moved on.

We have to invest both financially and collaboratively in the good work already taking place. To not do so means that opportunities that are almost within our grasp are not seized, and that people who have worked hard to offer us such opportunities are let down. We might lose the valuable expertise of such people through pure disillusionment, and yet the casual observer might still wonder when we might see the first fully open, Free Software friendly, mass-market-ready smartphone, thinking it is simply beyond “the community” to deliver. In fact, we might be letting the opportunity to deliver such things pass us by more often than we realise, purely out of ignorance of the ongoing endeavours of the community.

Diversions and Distractions

Ubuntu Edge sounds exciting. It is just a shame that it does not appear to enable and encourage everyone who has already been working to realise such ambitions on substantially lower budgets and with less of a brand reputation to cultivate the interest of the technology media and enthusiastic consumers. Millions of dollars of committed funds and an audience preferring to take the passive position of expectant customers, as opposed to becoming active contributors to existing efforts, all adds up to a diversion of participation and resources from open hardware projects.

Such blockbuster campaigns may even distract from open hardware projects because for those who might need slight persuasion to get involved, the apparition of an easy solution demanding only some spare cash and no intellectual investment may provide the discouragement necessary to affirm that as with so many other matters, somebody else has got them covered. Consequently, such people retreat from what might have been a rewarding pursuit that deepens their understanding of technology and the issues around it.

Not everyone has the time or inclination to get involved with open hardware, of course, especially if they are starting with practically no knowledge of the field. But with many people and their green pieces of paper parked and waiting for Ubuntu Edge, it is certainly possible to think that the campaign might make things even harder for the open hardware movement to get the recognition and the traction it deserves.

It is a recurring but tiresome joke: is this the year of the Linux desktop? In fact, the year I started using GNU/Linux on the desktop was 1995 when my university department installed the operating system as a boot option alongside Windows 3.1 on the machines in the “PC laboratory”, presumably starting the migration of Unix functionality away from expensive workstations supplied by Sun, DEC, HP and SGI and towards commodity hardware based on the Intel x86 architecture and supplied by companies who may not be around today either (albeit for reasons of competing with each other on razor-thin margins until the slightest downturn made their businesses non-viable). But on my own hardware, my own year of the Linux desktop was 1999 when I wiped Windows NT 4 from the laptop made available for my use at work (and subsequently acquired for my use at home) and installed Red Hat Linux 6.0 over an ISDN link, later installing Red Hat Linux 6.1 from the media included in the official boxed product bought at a local bookstore.

Back then, some people had noticed that GNU/Linux was offering a lot better reliability than the Windows range of products, and people using X11 had traditionally been happy enough (or perhaps knew not to ask for more) with a window manager, perhaps some helper utilities to launch applications, and some pop-up menus to offer shortcuts for common tasks. It wasn’t as if the territory beyond the likes of fvwm had not already been explored in the Unix scene: the first Unix workstations I used in 1992 had a product called X.desktop which sought to offer basic desktop functionality and file management, and other workstations offered such products as CDE or elements of Sun’s Open Look portfolio. But people could see the need for something rather more than just application launchers and file managers. At the very least, desktops also needed applications to be useful and those applications needed to look, act like, and work with the rest of the desktop to be credible. And the underlying technology needed to be freely available and usable so that anyone could get involved and so that the result could be distributed with all the other software in a GNU/Linux distribution.

It was this insight – that by giving that audience the tools and graphical experience that they needed or were accustomed to, the audience for Free Software would be broadened – that resulted first in KDE and then in GNOME; the latter being a reaction to the lack of openness of some of the software provided in the former as well as to certain aspects of the technologies involved (because not all C programmers want to be confronted with C++). I remember a conversation around the year 2000 with a systems administrator at a small company that happened to be a customer of my employer, where the topic somehow shifted to the adoption of GNU/Linux – maybe I noticed that the administrator was using KDE or maybe someone said something about how I had installed Red Hat – and the administrator noted how KDE, even at version 1.0, was at that time good enough and close enough to what people were already using for it to be rolled out to the company’s desktops. KDE 1.0 wasn’t necessarily the nicest environment in every regard – I switched to GNOME just to have a nicer terminal application and a more flexible panel – but one could see how it delivered a complete experience on a common technological platform rather than just bundling some programs and throwing them onto the screen when commanded via some apparently hastily-assembled gadget.

Of course, it is easy to become nostalgic and to forget the shortcomings of the Free Software desktop in the year 2000. Back then, despite the initial efforts in the KDE project to support HTML rendering that would ultimately produce Konqueror and lead to the WebKit family of browsers, the most credible Web browsing solution available to most people was, if one wishes to maintain nostalgia for a moment, the legendary Netscape Communicator. Indeed, despite its limitations, this application did much to keep the different desktop environments viable in certain kinds of workplaces, where as long as people could still access the Web and read their mail, and not cause problems for any administrators, people could pretty much get away with using whatever they wanted. However, the technological foundations for Netscape Communicator were crumbling by the month, and it became increasingly unsupported and unmaintained. Relying on a mostly proprietary stack of software as well as being proprietary itself, it was unmaintainable by any community.

Fortunately, the Free Software communities produced Web browsers that were, and are, not merely viable but also at the leading edge of their field in many ways. One might not choose to regard the years of Netscape Communicator’s demise as those of crisis, but we have much to be thankful for in this respect, not least that the Mozilla browser (in the form of SeaMonkey and Firefox) became a stable and usable product that did not demand too much of the hardware available to run it. And although there has never been a shortage of e-mail clients, it can be considered fortunate that projects such as KMail, Kontact and Evolution were established and have been able to provide years of solid service.

You Are Here

With such substantial investment made in the foundations of the Free Software desktop, and with its viability established many years ago (at least for certain groups of users), we might well expect to be celebrating now, fifteen years or so after people first started to see the need for such an endeavour, reaping the rewards of that investment and demonstrating a solution that is innovative and yet stable, usable and yet reliable: a safe choice that has few shortcomings and that offers more opportunities than the proprietary alternatives. It should therefore come as a shock that the position of the Free Software desktop has not been as troubled as it is now for quite some time.

As time passed by, KDE 1 was followed by KDE 2 and then KDE 3. I still use KDE 3, clinging onto the functionality while it still runs on a distribution that is still just about supported. When KDE 2 came out, I switched back from GNOME because the KDE project had a more coherent experience on offer than bundling Mozilla and Evolution with what we would now call the GNOME “shell”, and for a long time I used Konqueror as my main Web browser. Although things didn’t always work properly in KDE 3, and there are things that will never be fixed and polished, it perhaps remains the pinnacle of the project’s achievements.

On KDE 3, the panel responsible for organising and launching applications, showing running applications and the status of various things, just works; I may have spent some time moving icons around a few years ago, but it starts up and everything uses the right amount of space. The “K” (or “start”) menu is just a menu, leaving itself open to the organisational whims of the distribution, but on my near-obsolete Kubuntu version there’s not much in the way of bizarre menu entry and application duplication. Kontact lets me read mail and apply spam filters that are still effective, filter and organise my mail into folders; it shows HTML mail only when I ask it to, and it shows inline images only when I tell it to, which are both things that I have seen Thunderbird struggle with (amongst certain other things). Konqueror may not be a viable default for Web browsing any more, but it does a reasonable job for files on both local disks and remote systems via WebDAV and ssh, the former being seemingly impossible with Nautilus against the widely-deployed Free Software Web server that serves my files. Digikam lets me download, view and tag my pictures, occasionally also being used to fix the metadata; it only occasionally refuses to access my camera, mostly because the underlying mechanisms seem to take an unhealthy interest in how many files there are in the camera’s memory; Amarok plays my music from my local playlists, which is all I ask of it.

So when my distribution finally loses its support, or when I need to recommend a desktop environment to others, even though KDE 3 has served me very well, I cannot really recommend it because it has for the most part been abandoned. An attempt to continue development and maintenance does exist in the form of the Trinity Desktop Environment project, but the immensity of the task combined with the dissipation of the momentum behind KDE 3, and the effective discontinuation of the Qt 3 libraries that underpin the original software, means that its very viability must be questioned as its maintainers are stretched in every direction possible.

Why Can’t We All Get Along?

In an attempt to replicate what I would argue is the very successful environment that I enjoy, I tried to get Trinity working on a recent version of Ubuntu. The encouraging thing is that it managed to work, more or less, although there were some disturbing signs of instability: things would crash but then work when tried once more; the user administration panel wasn’t usable because it couldn’t find a shared library for the Python runtime environment that did, in fact, exist on the system. The “K” menu seemed to suffer from KDE 4 (or, rather, KDE Plasma Desktop) also being available on the same system because lots of duplicate menu entries were present. This may be an unfortunate coincidence, Trinity being overly helpful, or it may be a consequence of KDE 4 occupying the same configuration “namespace”. I sincerely hope that it is not the latter: any project that breaks compatibility and continuity in the fashion that KDE has done should not monopolise or corrupt a resource that actually contains the data of the user.

There probably isn’t any fundamental reason why Trinity could not return KDE 3 to some level of its former glory as a contemporary desktop environment, but getting there could certainly be made easier if everyone worked together a bit more. Having been obliged to do some user management tasks in another environment before returning to my exploration of Trinity, I attempted to set up a printer. Here, with the printer plugged in and me perusing the list of supported printers, there appeared to be no way of getting the system to recognise a three- or four-year-old printer that was just too recent for the list provided by Trinity. Returning to the other environment and trying there, a newer list was somehow obtained and the printer selected, although the exercise was still highly frustrating and didn’t really provide support for the exact model concerned.

But both environments presumably use the same print system, so why should one be better supplied than the other for printer definitions? Surely this is common infrastructure stuff that doesn’t specifically relate to any desktop environment or user interface. Is it easier to make such functionality for one environment than another, or just too convenient to take a short-cut and hack something up that covers the needs of one environment, or is it too much work to make a generic component to do the job and to package it correctly and to test it in more than a narrow configuration? Do the developers get worried about performance and start to consider complicated services that might propagate printer configuration details around the system in a high-performance manner before their manager or supervisor tells them to scale back their ambition?

I remember having to configure network printers in the previous century on Solaris using special script files. I am also sure that doing things at the lowest levels now would probably be just as frustrating, especially since the pain of Solaris would be replaced by the need to deal with things other than firing plain PostScript across the network, but there seems to be a wide gulf between this and the point-and-click tools between which some level of stability could exist and make sure that no matter how old and nostalgic a desktop environment may be perceived to be, at least it doesn’t need to dedicate effort towards tedious housekeeping or duplicating code that everyone needs and would otherwise need to write for themselves.

The Producers (and the Consumers)

One might be inclined to think that my complaints are largely formed through a bitter acceptance that things just don’t stay the same, although one can always turn this around and question why functioning software cannot go on functioning forever. Indeed, there is plenty of software on the planet that now goes about its business virtualised and still with the belief, if the operating assumptions of software can be considered in such a way, that it runs on the same range of hardware that it was written for, that hardware having been introduced (and even retired) decades ago. But for software that has to be run in a changing environment, handling new ways of doing things as well as repelling previously unimagined threats to its correct functioning and reliability, needing a community of people who are willing to maintain and develop the software further, one has to accept that there are practical obstacles to the sustained use of that software in the environments for which it was intended.

Particularly the matter of who is going to do all the hard work, and what incentives might exist to persuade them to do it if not for personal satisfaction or curiosity, is of crucial importance. This is where conflicts and misunderstandings emerge. If the informal contract between the users and developers were taking place with no historical context whatsoever, with each side having expectations of the other, one might be more inclined to sympathise with the complaints of developers that they do all the hard work and yet the users merely complain. Yet in practice, the interactions take place in the context of the users having invested in the software, too. Certainly, even if the experience has not been one of complete, uninterrupted enjoyment, the users may not have invested as much energy as the developers, but they will have played their own role in the success of the endeavour. Any radical change to the contract involves writing off the users’ investment as well as that of the developers, and without the users providing incentives and being able to direct the work, they become exposed to unpredictable risk.

One fair response to the supposed disempowerment of the user is that the user should indeed “pay their way”. I see no conflict between this and the sustainable development of Free Software at all. If people want things done, one way that society has thoroughly established throughout the ages is that people pay for it. This shouldn’t stop people freely sharing software (or not, if they so choose), because people should ultimately realise that for something to continue on a sustainable basis, they or some part of society has to provide for the people continuing that effort. But do desktop developers want the user to pay up and have a say in the direction of the product? There is something liberating about not taking money directly from your customers and being able to treat the exercise almost like art, telling the audience that they don’t have to watch the performance if they don’t like it.

This is where we encounter the matter of reputation: the oldest desktop environments have been established for long enough that they are widely accepted by distributions, even though the KDE project that produces KDE 4 has quite a different composition and delivers substantially different code from the KDE project that produced KDE 3. By keeping the KDE brand around, the project of today is able to trade on its long-standing reputation, reassure distributions that the necessary volunteers will be able to keep up with packaging obligations, and indeed attract such volunteers through widespread familiarity with the brand. That is the good side of having a recognised brand; the bad side is that people’s expectations are higher and that they expect the quality and continuity that the brand has always offered them.

What’s Wrong with Change?

In principle, nothing is essentially wrong with change. Change can complement the ways that things have always been done, and people can embrace new ways and come to realise that the old ways were just inferior. So what has changed on the Free Software desktop and how does it complement and improve on those trusted old ways of doing things?

It can be argued that KDE and GNOME started out with environments like CDE and Windows 95 acting as their inspiration at some level. As GNOME began to drift towards resembling the “classic” Mac OS environment in the GNOME 2 release series, having a menu bar at the top of the screen through which applications and system settings could be accessed, together with the current time and other status details, projects like XFCE gained momentum by appealing to the audience for whom the simple but configurable CDE paradigm was familiar and adequate. And now that Unity has reintroduced the Mac-style top menu bar as the place where application menus appear – a somewhat archaic interface even in the late 1980s – we can expect more users to discover other projects. In effect, the celebrated characteristics of the community around Free Software have let people go their own way in the company of developers who they felt shared the same vision or at least understood their needs best.

That people can indeed change their desktop environment and choose to run different software is a strength of Free Software and the platforms built on it, but the need for people to have to change – that those running GNOME, for example, feel that their needs are no longer being met and must therefore evaluate alternatives like XFCE – is a weakness brought about by projects that will happily enjoy the popularity delivered by the reputation of their “brand”, and who will happily enjoy having an audience delivered by previous versions of that software, but who then feel that they can change the nature of their product in ways that no longer meet that audience’s needs while pretending to be delivering the same product. If a user can no longer do something in a new release of a product, that should be acknowledged as a failing in that product. The user should not be compelled to find another product to use and be told that since a choice of software exists, he or she should be prepared to exercise that choice at the first opportunity. Such disregard for the user’s own investment in the software that has now abandoned him or her, not to mention the waste of the user’s time and energy in having to install alternative software just to be able to keep doing the same things, is just unacceptable.

“They are the 90%”

Sometimes attempts at justifying or excusing change are made by referring to the potential audience reached by a significantly modified product. Having a satisfied group of users numbering in the thousands is not always as exciting as one that numbers in the millions, and developers can be jealous of the success of others in reaching such numbers. One still sees labels like “10x” or “x10” being used and notions of ten-fold increases in audiences as being a necessary strategy phrased in a new and innovative way, mostly by people who perhaps missed such terminology and the accompanying strategic doctrine the first time round (or second, or third time) many years ago, and such order-of-magnitude increases are often dictated by the assumption that the 90% not currently in the audience for a product would find the product too complicated or too technologically focused and that the product must therefore discard features, or change the way it exposes its features, in order to appeal to that 90%.

Unfortunately, such initiatives to reach larger audiences risk alienating the group of users that are best understood in order to reach groups of users that are largely under-researched and thus barely understood at all. (The 90% is not a single monolithic block of identically-minded people, of course, so there is more than one group of users.) Now, one tempting way of avoiding the need to understand the untapped mass of potential users is to imitate those who are successfully reaching those users already or who at least aspire to do so. Thus, KDE 4 and Windows Vista had a certain similarity, presumably because various visual characteristics of Vista, such as its usage of desktop gadgets, were perceived to be useful features applicable to the wider marketplace and thus “must have” features that provide a way to appeal to people who don’t already use KDE or Windows. (Having a tiny picture frame on the desktop background might be a nice way of replicating the classic picture of one’s closest family on one’s physical desktop, but I doubt that it makes or breaks the adoption of a technology. Many people are still using their computer at a desk or at home where they still have those pictures in plain view; most people aren’t working from the beach where they desperately need them as a thumbnail carousel obscured by their application windows.)

However, it should be remembered that the products being imitated may also originate from organisations who also do not really understand their potential audience, either. Windows Vista was perceived to be a decisive response by Microsoft to the threat of alternative platforms but was regarded as a flop despite being forced on computer purchasers. And even if new users adopt such products, it doesn’t mean that they welcome or unconditionally approve of the supposed innovations introduced in their name, especially if Microsoft and its business partners forced those users to adopt such products when buying their current machine.

The Linux Palmtop and the Linux Desktop

With the success of Android – or more accurately, Android/Linux – claims may be made that radical departures from the traditional desktop software stacks and paradigms are clearly the necessary ingredient for success for GNU/Linux on the desktop, and it might be said that if only people had realised this earlier, the Free Software desktop would have become dominant. Moreover, it might also be argued that “desktop thinking” held back adoption of Linux on mobile devices, too, opening the door for a single vendor to define the payload that delivered Linux to the mobile-device-consuming masses. Certainly, the perceived need for a desktop on a mobile or PDA (personal digital assistant) is entrenched: go back a few years and the GNOME Palmtop Environment (GPE) was seen as the counterweight to Windows CE on something like a Compaq iPAQ. Even on the Golden Delicious GTA04 device, LXDE – a lightweight desktop environment – has been the default environment, admittedly more for verification purposes than for practical use as a telephone.

Naturally, a desktop environment is fairly impractical on a small screen with limited navigational controls. Although early desktop systems had fewer pixels than today’s smartphones, the increased screen size provided much greater navigational control and matched the desktop paradigm much better. It is interesting to note that the Xerox Star had a monochrome 1024×809 display, which is perhaps still larger than many smartphones, that (according to the Wikipedia entry) “…was meant to be able to display two 8.5×11 in pages side by side in actual size”. Even when we become able to show the equivalent amount of content on a smartphone screen at a resolution sufficient to permit its practical use, perhaps with very good eyesight or some additional assistance through magnification, it will remain a challenge to navigate that information precisely. Selecting text, for instance, will not be possible without a very precise pointing instrument.

Of course, one way of handling such challenges that is already prevalent is that of being able to zoom in and out of the content, with the focus in recent years on being able to do so through gestures, although the ability to zoom in on documents at arbitrary levels has been around for many years in the computer-aided design, illustration and desktop publishing fields amongst others, and the notion of general user interfaces permitting fluid scrolling and zooming over a surface showing content was already prominent before smartphones adopted and popularised it further. On the one hand, new and different “form factors” – kinds of device with different characteristics – offer improved methods of navigation, perhaps being more natural than the traditional mouse and keyboard attached to a desktop computer, but those methods may not lend themselves to use on a desktop computer with its proven ergonomics of sitting at a comfortable distance from a generously proportioned display and being able to enter textual input using a dedicated device with an efficiency that is difficult to match using, say, a virtual keyboard on a touchscreen.

Proclamations may occasionally be made that work at desks in offices will become obsolete in favour of the mobile workplace, but as that mobile workplace is apparently so often situated at the café table, the aircraft tray table, or once the lap or forearm is tired of supporting a device, some other horizontal surface, the desktop paradigm with its supporting cast of input devices and sophisticated applications will still be around in some form and cannot be convincingly phased out in favour of content consumption paradigms that refuse to tackle the most demanding of the desktop functionality we enjoy today.

The Real Obstacle

Up to this point, my pontification has limited itself to considering what has made the “Linux desktop” attractive in the past, what makes it attractive or unattractive today, and whether the directions currently being taken might make it more attractive to new audiences and to existing users, or instead fail to capture the interest of new audiences whilst alienating existing users. In an ideal world, with every option given equal attention, and with every individual able to exercise a completely free choice and adopt the product or solution that meets his or her own needs best, we could focus on the above topic and not have to worry about anything else. Unfortunately, we do not live in such an ideal world.

Most hardware sold in retail outlets visited by the majority of potential and current computer users is bundled with proprietary software in the form of Microsoft Windows. Indeed, in these outlets, accounting for the bulk of retail sales of computers to private customers, it is not possible to refuse the bundled software and to choose to buy only the hardware so that an alternative software system may be used with the computer instead (or at least not without needing to pursue vendors afterwards, possibly via legal avenues). In such an anticompetitive environment, many customers associate the bundled software with computer hardware in general and remain unaware of alternatives, leaving the struggle to educate those customers to motivated individuals, organisations like the FSF (and FSFE), and to independent retailers.

Unfortunately, individuals and organisations have to spend their own time and money (or their volunteers’ time and their donors’ money) righting the wrongs of the industry. Independent retailers offer hardware without bundled software, or offer Free Software pre-installed as a convenience but without cost, but the low margins on such “bare” or Free Software systems mean that they too are fixing the injustices of the system at their own expense. Once again, our considerations need to be broadened so as to not merely consider the merits of Free Software delivered as a desktop environment for the end-user, but also to the challenge of getting that software in front of the end-user in the first place. And further still: although we might (and should) consider encouraging regulatory bodies to investigate the dubious practices of product bundling, we also need to consider how we might support those who attempt to reach out and educate end-users without waiting for the regulators to act.

Putting the Pieces Together

One way we might support those getting Free Software onto hardware and into the hands of end-users – in this case, purchasers of new computer hardware – is to help them, the independent retailers, command a better price for their products. If all other things are equal, people generally will not pay more for something that they can get cheaper elsewhere. If they can be persuaded to believe that a product is better in certain ways, then paying a little more doesn’t seem so bad, and the extra cost can often be justified. Sadly, convincing people about the merits of Free Software can be a time-consuming process, and people may not see the significance of those merits straight away, and so other merits are also required to help build up a sustainable margin that can be fed into the Free Software ecosystem.

Some organisations advocate that bundling services is an acceptable way of appealing to end-users and making a bit of money that can fund Free Software development. However, such an approach risks bringing with it all that is undesirable about the illegitimately-bundled software that customers are obliged to accept on their new computer: advertising, compromised user experiences, and the feeling that they are not in control of their purchase. Moreover, seeking revenue from service providers or selling proprietary services to existing end-users fails to seriously tackle the market access issue that impacts Free Software the most.

A better and proven way of providing additional persuasion is, of course, to make a better product, which is why it is crucial to understand whether the different communities developing the “Linux desktop” are succeeding in doing so or not. If not, we need to understand what we need to do to help people offer viable products that people will buy and use, because the alternative is to continue our under-resourced campaign of only partly successful persuasion and education. And this may put our other activities at risk, too, affording us only desperate resistance to all the nasty anticompetitive measures, both political and technical, that well-resourced and industry-dominating corporations are able to initiate with relative ease.

In short, our activities need to fit together and to support each other so that the whole endeavour may be sustainable and be able to withstand the threats levelled against it and against us. We need to deliver a software experience that people will use and continue to use, we need to recognise that those who get that software in front of end-users need our support in running a viable business doing so (far more than large vendors who only court the Free Software communities when it suits them), and we need to acknowledge the threats to our communities and to be prepared to fight those threats or to support those who do so.

Once we have shown that we can work together and act on all of these simultaneously and continuously as a community, maybe then it will become clear that the year of the Linux desktop has at last arrived for good.

Thomas Koch asks what we think about the Fairphone.

I think that the Fairphone people are generally aware of Free Software and are in favour of it, but I also think that such matters are somewhat beyond their existing experiences, so that’s why the illustration on their site is a phone running something that might be Windows Phone (I wouldn’t really know, myself) showing Skype on the screen.

The rather awkward-to-navigate Web site mentions…

Root access: Install your preferred operating system and take control of your data.

Android OS (4.2 Jelly Bean): Special interface developed by Kwame Corporation (Also open!)

Of course, without a full familiarity with Free Software, it’s very easy for people to say “open” and not deliver what we expect when we consider openness and freedom. Moreover, without proper hardware support, promises of “root access” don’t go very far. It does seem to be the case that the “special interface” will be released as Free Software (more information available on the DroidCon site in a slightly more convenient form than the alternatives). But I haven’t seen much evidence of truly open support for the “Mediatek 6589 chipset” although it is theoretically possible that it could exist. That the MT6589 apparently employs PowerVR technology does not inspire a great deal of hope for Free Software drivers and firmware, however.

Certainly, those of us interested in Free Software should consider helping Fairphone to deliver the same kind of transparency in the software supply chain that they intend to deliver in the physical supply chains. Having software that can in its entirety be maintained independently of the hardware vendor means that the device can be viable indefinitely, and the result would be a product that promotes the sustainability aspirations of the Fairphone endeavour.

I’d be tempted to order one myself if we could realistically expect to bring about Free (and Fair) Software on a Freephone.

Having read a commentary on “rivals” to the increasingly well-known Raspberry Pi, and having previously read a commentary that criticised the product and the project for not upholding the claimed ideals of encouraging top-to-bottom experimentation in computing and recreating the environment of studying systems at every level from the hardware through the operating system to the applications, I find myself scrutinising both the advocacy as well as the criticism of the project to see how well it measures up to those ideals and whether the project objectives and how the way they are to be achieved can be seen as still being appropriate thirty years on from the introduction of microcomputers to the masses.

The latter, critical commentary is provocatively titled “Why Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable for Education” because the Raspberry Pi product, or at least the hardware being sold, is supposedly aimed at education just as the BBC Microcomputer was in the early 1980s. A significant objective of the Computer Literacy Project in that era was to introduce microcomputers in the educational system (at many levels, not just in primary and secondary schools, although that is clearly by far the largest area in the educational sector) and to encourage learning using educational software tools as well as learning about computing itself. Indeed, the “folklore” around the Raspberry Pi is meant to evoke fond memories of that era, with Model A and B variants of the device, and with various well-known personalities being involved in the initiative in one way or another.

Now, if I were to criticise the Raspberry Pi initiative and to tread on toes in doing so, I would rather state something more specific than “education” because I don’t think that making low-cost hardware to education is a bad thing at all, even if it does leave various things to be desired with regard to the openness of the hardware. The former commentary mentioned above makes the point that cheap computers means fewer angry people when or if they get broken, and this is hard to disagree with, although I would caution people into thinking that it means we can treat these devices as disposable items to be treated carelessly. In fact, I would be as specific as to state that the Raspberry Pi is not the equivalent of the BBC Micro.

In the debate about openness, one focus is on the hardware and whether the users can understand and experiment with it. The BBC Micro used a number of commodity components, many of which are still available in some form today, with only perhaps one or two proprietary integrated circuits in the form of uncommitted logic arrays (ULAs), and the circuit diagram was published in various manuals. (My own experience with such matters is actually related to the Acorn Electron which is derived from the BBC Micro and which uses fewer components by merging the tasks of some of those omitted components into a more complicated ULA which also sacrifices some functionality.) In principle, apart from the ULAs for which only block diagrams and pin-outs were published, it was possible to understand the functioning of the hardware and thus make your own peripheral hardware without signing non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) or being best friends with the manufacturer.

Meanwhile, although things are known about the components used by the Raspberry Pi, most obviously the controversial choice of system-on-a-chip (SoC) solution, the information available to make your own is not readily available. Would it be possible to make a BBC Micro from the published information? In fact, there was a version of the BBC Micro made and sold under licence in India where the intention was to source only the ULAs from Acorn (the manufacturer of the BBC Micro) and to make everything else in India. Would it be desirable to replicate the Raspberry Pi exactly? For a number of reasons it would neither be necessary nor would it be desirable to focus so narrowly on one specific device, and I will return to this shortly.

But first, on the most controversial aspect of the Raspberry Pi, it has been criticised by a number of people for using a SoC that incorporates the CPU core alongside proprietary functionality including the display/graphics hardware. Indeed, the system can only boot through the use of proprietary firmware that runs on a not-publicly-documented processing core for which the source code may never be made available. This does raise concern about the sustainability of the device in terms of continued support from the manufacturer of the SoC – it is doubtful that Broadcom will stick with the component in question for very long given the competitive pressures in the market for such hardware – as well as the more general issues of transparency (what does that firmware really do?) and maintainability (can I fix bad hardware behaviour myself?). Many people play down these latter issues, but it is clear that many people also experience problems with proprietary graphics hardware, with its sudden unexplainable crashes, and proprietary BIOS firmware, with its weird behaviour (why does my BIOS sometimes not boot the machine and just sit there with a stupid Intel machine version message?) and lack of functionality.

One can always argue that the operating system on the BBC Micro was proprietary and the source code never officially published – books did apparently appear in print with disassembled code listings, clearly testing then-imprecisely-defined boundaries of copyright – and that the Raspberry Pi can run GNU/Linux (and the proprietary operating system, RISC OS, that is perhaps best left as a historical relic), and if anything I would argue that the exposure that Free Software gets from the Raspberry Pi is one of the initiative’s most welcome outcomes. Back in the microcomputer era, proprietary things were often regarded as being good things in the misguided sense that since they are only offered by one company to customers of that company, they would presumably offer exclusive features that not only act as selling points for that company’s products but also give customers some kind of “edge” over people buying the products of the competitors, if this mattered to you, of course, which is arguably most celebrated in recollections of playground/schoolyard arguments over who had the best computer.

The Computer Literacy Project, even though it did offer funding to buy hardware from many vendors, sadly favoured one vendor in particular. This might seem odd as a product of a government and an ideology that in most aspects of public life in the United Kingdom emphasised and enforced competition, even in areas where competition between private companies was a poor solution for a problem best solved by state governance, and so de-facto standards as opposed to genuine standards ruled the education sector (just as de-facto standards set by corporations, facilitated by dubious business practices, ruled other sectors from that era onwards). Thus, a substantial investment was made in equipment and knowledge tied to one vendor, and it would be that vendor the customers would need to return to if they wanted more of the same, either to continue providing education on the range of supported topics or related ones, or to leverage the knowledge gained for other purposes.

The first commentary mentioned above uses the term “the new Raspberry Pi” as if the choice is between holding firm to a specific device with its expanding but specific ecosystem of products and other offerings or discarding it and choosing something that offers more “bang for the buck”. Admittedly, the commentary also notes that there are other choices for other purposes. But just as the BBC Micro enjoyed a proliferation of peripheral hardware, software commissioned for the platform as well as software written as the market expanded, and even though this does mean that people will be able to do things that they never considered doing before, particularly with hardware and electronics, there is a huge risk that all of this will be done in a way that emphasises a specific device – a specific solution involving specific investments – that serves to fragment the educational community and reproduce the confusion and frustration of the microcomputer era where a program or device required a specific machine to work.

Although it appeals to people’s nostalgia, the educational materials that should be (and presumably are) the real deliverable of the Raspberry Pi initiative should not seek to recreate the Tower of Babel feeling brought about by opening a 1980s book like Computer Spacegames and having to make repeated corrections to programs so that they may have a chance of running on a particular system (even though this may in itself have inspired a curiosity in myself for the diversity seen in systems and both machine and natural languages). Nothing should be “the old Raspberry Pi” or “the new Raspberry Pi” or “the even newer Raspberry Pi” because dividing things up like this will mean that people will end up using the wrong instructions for the wrong thing and being frustrated and giving up. Just looking at the chaos in the periphery around the Arduino is surely enough of a warning.

In short, we should encourage diversity in the devices and solutions offered for people to learn about computing, and we should seek to support genuine standards and genuine openness so that everyone can learn from each other, work with each other’s kit, and work together on materials that support them all as easily and as well as possible. Otherwise, we will have learned nothing from the past and will repeat the major mistakes of the 1980s. That is why the Raspberry Pi should not be the new BBC Micro.

Have you ever wanted to buy a computer without paying a certain corporation for a product of theirs that you don’t want? Were you concerned that, regardless of whether you managed to buy a system without that unwanted operating system, the hardware might not support your favourite operating system distribution properly, leaving you unable to use some of the computer’s hardware (like the wireless network or some of the fancy graphical capabilities)? Were you worried that you might need to do extra work to support your favourite distribution and that people you know would end up blaming you for persuading them to try out something like GNU/Linux? Did you ever try to buy a “computer that runs Linux” from a major manufacturer only to find yourself navigating a labyrinth on their Web site (with every passage prominently marked with an advertisement for the unwanted proprietary product of a certain corporation), ending up either on a page telling you that they don’t sell that model any more, or on a “404 not found” page with all traces of that model erased from the record as if it never existed in the first place?

On the Fellowship Wiki, we are trying to put together an up-to-date list of vendors selling systems that at the very least don’t involve you paying the “Windows Tax“, and preferably involve the option of having a Free Software operating system distribution (like a GNU/Linux flavour such as Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu) pre-installed and ready to use. Although we don’t endorse any vendors – this is just research into those offering solutions that are friendly to Free Software – we hope that this resource will be useful for anyone looking to buy a new computer and act as an encouragement for other vendors to offer products that uphold healthy competition and appeal to an increasing group of people who care about things like Free Software, privacy, the right to control their own computer, the provenance of the software on their computer, the sustainability of their computing environment, and, of course, the proper functioning of the market for personal computers (where one company should not decide what everyone gets to use).

Go to the Hardware Vendors page to see what we’ve found so far, along with links to other resources that have provided good directions to friendly vendors, and feel free to contribute if you are an FSFE Fellow with some expertise of your own in this area. With the vast majority of ready-to-use computers sold via retail channels bundled with proprietary software, the market has been distorted to make the adoption of Free Software more difficult and to keep end-users ignorant of the benefits of Free Software and their right to control their own computer. Please consider helping us to level the playing field!