My phone is supposed to be a smart phone, the Openmoko Neofreerunner. In reality I've found it to be very good at some things like running Free Software, but when it comes to social things like phone calls and text messages it's often left not knowing what to do. I still love it though.

But couldn't he sue because he is a customer? The company sold him a device that includes software for which the license is GPL, but is not respecting his rights under the GPL. The rights that the GPL grants are primarily to the user, are they not?

RIght on!

I would mod you up for this but I don't get points anymore.

Thank you for calling the telcos robber barons, that is exactly what they are. Net neutrality isn't about government regulation, it's about not ceding power to regulate the internet to corporations.

If the government cannot be trusted to regulate the internet, how can we possibly trust a handful of corporate giants? It's ridiculous to argue that the interests of the telcos are in line with the interests of everybody else.

A free internet is just as important as a free market. Without net neutrality, innovation on the internet will be crippled once only the incumbent giants can afford to pay premium for the fast lane.

I'm no fan of big government, but I cannot understand why so many advocates of small government are not also afraid of the big business trampling all over their rights and freedoms. The reality is that the Fortune 500 are integral part of how the world is "governed", whether they fall under the category of government or not. Where is the Tea Bagger uprising against the corporate establishment?

It's worth nothing that you cannot run arbitrary code on a Tivo because they use DRM to prevent unsigned kernels from being loaded. "Tivo-ization" was a primary motivation for the FSF to write the GPL3.

Myself, I don't understand why some people draw the line for software freedom at embedded systems. I can understand it if most people would want to use the ROM that came with their phone/media player/ebook reader/DVR unaltered. But we should have the right to do whatever we want with our devices.

The Openmoko community is a breeding ground for mobile Linux distros and and the FSO middleware. FSO and these distros, like SHR, Hackable:1, QtMoko will eventually be ported to other devices. That's one reason why Openmoko is still relevant. The work being done on Freerunners now will eventually result in being able to replace the proprietary parts of the Pre or the n900 with all Free software, or potentially replace the OS on an Android phone with a Linux distro that runs a X.org server.

The people using and developing for the Openmoko phones are very familiar with its faults. They use the phone and develop for it because the Freerunner is the most open handset available. It's a labour of love, and there are a lot of folks in the community that are very committed to Free Software.

If nothing else, Openmoko gave a bunch of nerds a crack at creating their own mobile operating system. It had the potential (and maybe still does through FSO and SHR) to enable the kind of built in the garage innovation that brought about companies like HP and Apple. That's a bit of a long shot, but a lot of great work has come out of the Openmoko community and things are still moving along.

I'm pretty sure that 90% of /. is somewhere on the aspergers syndrome. 74 comments when I loaded the page, and I had to scroll down the last 10 or so to read any that weren't about the reviewer's choice in pronouns.

Except that you'll be paying the same monthly rates as customers who did get a subsidized phone from their carrier. That's not fair. Those of us who buy their own phones should get lower rates. When I brought my Openmoko Neo Freerunner to Fido (in Canada), it was actually cheaper to get a Nokia feature phone than to just get a SIM card.

Are you sure about that? From the quick facts side-bar on the CPIC overview page:

The Automated Canada United States Police Information Exchange System (ACUPIES) provides CPIC users a link to the U.S. National Crime Information Centre data banks, and all U.S. users access to the CPIC files. Currently, this link is processing over 12 million transactions per year.

Wikipedia links to a reference that claims that the "wandering persons" database (for tracking alzheimers patients) is not shared with the US. So they don't get complete access, but they can access CPIC.

Actually, police records are shared between Canada and the US. The police keep a file on you if they've ever spoken to you (and taken your name, birthday and address) whether you're actually in trouble or just a witness. American police have access to those files. If a Canadian is pulled over by the police in the US, the US police officer will see their Canadian police file when they do their check.

Or maybe SIIA has been given a preview of what's being negotiated for the secret ACTA treaty.

National security my ass...

It's too bad this isn't under the AGPL. Maybe it has to be GPL2 because of what it's based on. But with the GPL2 source only has to be shared with people who receive binaries. This does not include visitors to a website, or an in-browser game in this case.

The AGPL got me thinking about the relevance of FLOSS if everything moves to cloud computing. If this project takes off, it would be a "cloud" that is based on FLOSS. Meaning that others could take the code and run their own "clouds". It would be the same as it is now, only instead of connecting to player-run servers through the game menus you would surf to them in a browser.

Either way, I'm far to crappy on FPS, so unless the game has safe-zones for hippies that don't like killing it won't be very fun for me.

You're right that we just shouldn't give them our money, but there's something to be said for cracking DRM and making all the work they did irrelevant. Developing DRM becomes less and less attractive when every time a new system is used it gets broken.

I think the point of complaining about DRM to is raise awareness about the issue amongst people who don't yet understand the ramifications. And complaining is pretty fun... this is Slashdot after all.