Openmoko

» see openmoko.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The Neo 1973 went on sale ten days after the first iPhone, and that timing is most of the story. Openmoko's two phones landed inside my university years and inside my stack, which makes the distance worth explaining instead of assuming. Ordering a developer handset direct from Taiwan for $300 was not something anyone around me did in 2007. In Turkey you carried the phone your operator sold you with the contract, and importing hardware meant customs plus a wait measured in weeks.

Openmoko was announced on 7 november 2006 by First International Computer, a Taiwanese firm that had spent two decades building motherboards under other people's brands. The plan was a phone with every layer opened, from the Linux userland down to the board schematics. The Neo 1973 shipped on 9 july 2007 at $300 for the basic unit or $450 for the kit with the debug board. The Neo FreeRunner followed on 25 june 2008 at $250, adding wifi and a pair of motion sensors.

I never held one. Almost everyone who did was building for it, which was simultaneously the point and the problem. Openmoko sold to an audience defined by wanting to rewrite the phone from the bootloader up, and that audience is small in any country and smaller in mine.

~ the case file ~

~ what open actually meant ~

Most phones described as open in 2008 meant you could install applications. Openmoko meant the board schematics were published and the firmware was unsigned, on a device that shipped expecting you to flash something else onto it before the week was out. There was no layer the manufacturer kept for itself. If you wanted to know what a register did, the answer was in a document you already had.

The community took that seriously. Separate groups shipped their own distributions for the FreeRunner, including SHR and QtMoko, alongside ports of Debian and Android. That is a lot of independent software for a device that sold in the tens of thousands. It is also the clearest sign of what was going wrong: the official stack was not good enough to stop people from replacing it.

~ the slide ~

The FreeRunner had real hardware faults, including a GPS that degraded when the SD card was busy and a buzz that got into calls. None of it was fatal on its own, but every fix arrived through a company that was also trying to write an entire mobile operating system with a team you could fit in one room.

Then the ground moved underneath. Google announced Android in november 2007 and gave handset makers an operating system that was free to ship and open enough for the press release. Apple had already shown that people would pay for a phone where none of this was their business. Openmoko was selling the opposite proposition at a higher price to a smaller audience.

~ what replaced it ~

Development of the next phone, the GTA03, was suspended on 2 april 2009. Roughly half the staff went with it. What remained of Openmoko Inc shipped the WikiReader that october, a small offline Wikipedia box with three buttons and no networking of any kind, which was discontinued in 2014.

The phone itself did not quite stop. Golden Delicious Computers built the GTA04 board as a drop-in replacement and delivered the first units on 10 october 2011, years after the company that designed the case had moved on. Everything Openmoko argued for came back later under other names, in the PinePhone and the Librem 5, sold to the same small audience at the same structural disadvantage. The address openmoko.com now answers with a bot check and nothing behind it.

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