The LinuxTag 2013 is over, and I want to share some brief impressions I got during our stay in Berlin.
The LinuxTag is a nice and well organized FOSS exhibition in Germany, attracting more than 10.000 visitors during 4 days.
We gave a talk about the OpenPhoenux project at the 2nd evening and had about 60 listeners. Some of them got very interested and followed us to the booth afterwards. For everyone who couldn’t participate, the slides are available online: Slides.pdf
We shared a booth with some other “Linux & Embedded” projects, namely: OpenEmbedded, Ethernut, Nut/OS, Oswald/Metawatch. Our Booth was professionally looking and I think we got quite some people interested in the project. Basically we had a constant flow of people at the booth during our 3 days stay and the overall feedback was rather positive!
We got interviewed by the “GNU funzt!” team, as well. The (german) video is now available on Youtube (OpenPhoenux interview is starting at 5:00):
All in all it was a very nice stay in Berlin. I especially enjoyed meeting and chatting with guys who already owned a GTA04. It looks like the community is growing again!
Links:
I’ve done a bit of research on free smartphones and I’m happy to see the world of free software smartphones being revived.
There is one major problem. While it is possible to make a mostly free smartphone, its nearly impossible to a truly fully free JUST MOBILE PHONE. Let alone smartphone!
Why?
Baseband is why, see http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/ for more info.
I’m sure there are many more problems. Sadly, I don’t see a fully free smartphone being a reality this year, probably even the next. Or even just a normal mobile phone.
Gotta say though… that wooden case. So nice!
A subtitled English version of that version would be nice, love you Germans!
Thanks for reading.
Yes, unfortunately a fully free baseband isn’t just an engineering problem, but also a legal problem in most countries of the world.