Momentum
written by
Mickey
on 2008-06-16
Momentum is something really strange! It's hardly predictable and you have to run to catch it before it goes away -- but when it's there, things are progressing like there's no tomorrow :-)
There's a whole lot of momentum present in some of the projects I care about:
OpenEmbedded
- OpenEmbedded will abandon monotone and move to git as its primary SCM. This will increase the wide-spread adoption of OE and attract new people. We will have more (shortlived) branches and merges will be easier. We will also revamp the commit policies a bit to introduce more stability to both the stable and the unstable branches.
- Setting up the non-profit organization (german registered association e.V.) is progressing and we will soon have our legal entity.
- Some couraged people are revamping our website into something that's more accurate, structured, (and pretty). Good for both OE-novices and experts.
OpenEZX
- OpenEZX developers started to push for mainline inclusion. This will greatly increase the visibility of our project.
- OpenEZX developers are working on a 2nd stage bootloader that overwrites the MOTO kernel, but leaves the rest of the flash file system untouched -- by this we can boot both an OpenEZX kernel from SD as well as the original system (with its kernel on SD), which makes testing a relief.
- We found security holes in the MOTOMAGX kernel, which may enable us to put our own code on these systems.
- Motorola has released new devices, apparantly running EZX. More devices for the platform!
- Openmoko's Framework and Zhone phone UI is going to provide a slick looking -- working -- featurephone userland for OpenEZX -- the first releases are just a couple of days away. It's now important we get kernel work finished, so we can release something that is a real alternative to the closed source MOTO system on EZX devices.
Openmoko
- Openmoko successfully went into mass production of the Neo FreeRunner (GTA02) device. Finally, people will have the 2nd generation of the first truly open source hardware platform in their hands.
- The Qtopia/Enlightenment based next generation software update is progressing nicely. I expect a release in the next couple of weeks.
- The new dbus-centric Openmoko framework initiative as well as the Zhone bread-and-butter application will see a release within the next 48 hours.
Exciting times for Linux on mobile platforms, n'est-ce pas?