I think that if Nokia was in better state few years ago, Elop wouldn't be chosen as a CEO at all, so he wouldn't have a possibility to destroy it. But maybe that's just me being naive :)

>earlier management said to retire Symbian and migrate to the newer system

They did, but not before years of internal competition making both teams reinvent the wheel and limiting collaboration between them. Maemo 6/Meego as seen on Nokia N9 was entirely reimplemented three times. When it all started, Symbian team was also doing transition to Qt - just like Maemo; but internal conflicts, on both management and "engineers morale" levels led them to implement completely separate, incompatible libraries, wasting time of both teams.

Management eventually made a right decision, but it was already too late to stop Elop from destroying it all completely.

That's what I've been referring to. Putting some parts together to get modem working on Raspberry Pi maybe isn't hard, but it's definitely a great experience for a hobbyist doing something like that for the first time. In contrast, adding WiFi module and installing some SIP software on it is actually brain-dead simple (apt-get install linphone? :P) - it won't teach you anything more, and it won't work in any reasonable way as well thanks to Raspberry Pi limitations.

Doing stuff like that is great when they're fun, you can learn something from it or you can brag about it. Implementing suggestions above will provide none of these things, while it might provide a disappointment when you'll keep your hopes too high.

Because extending the scope of cool project from cool to pointless is just... pointless :)

By the way, this is not the first DIY mobile phone: here's a phone made out of Nokia N810 Internet Tablet: http://talk.maemo.org/showthre...

Unfortunately, Maemo/Meego plan was internally fought over by the Symbian team, creating unnecessary, unhealthy competition inside Nokia and delaying success of any of them. When Nokia finally realized that it was Maemo that had greatest potential for future, not Symbian, they were already quite a lot behind competitors. Elop could either make risky, but potentially beneficial for the company decision in favor of Maemo/Meego, or take an easy road as a trojan horse, mostly beneficial for himself and for stakeholders in short term.

It's a pretty sad story about major mistakes in management of a very big player, which at its last chance to return into significance after couple of bad moves was just kicked in its balls by someone who was supposed to take care of it and gradually sold cheaply.

There's no need for that.

I guess it depends on the case you'll put it into. If it'll look like a regular old brick-phone, then there will be no difference between mass-produced and "DIY" one. Both of them will be subject to active eavesdropping by BTSes inside the airport and will be prevented to connect to regular ones outside the airport with jamming, so with "DIY" one you're just as "safe" as with the regular one.

Any other interpretation is basically impossible, so well...

For WiFi SIP you could just use phones like Neo900, GTA04 or maybe even Freerunner. Each of them will give you better battery life, better performance (except Freerunner) and won't require you to run proprietary software on them, unlike Raspberry Pi.

Such DIY project is very nice thing to do as a part of your hobby, but any practical usage will be killed by lack of proper power management.

Also, "The choice of Canonical to use a binary only baseband is even more disappointing when Osmocom have already produced a functional open-source GSM baseband for the Calypso chipset. One must wonder why was this not adopted or improved upon by the talented individuals at Canonical, especially given the previous enthusiasm for open-source philosophy."

The reason is simple. They didn't want to limit their capabilities to 2G EDGE. I suppose that the target niche that could accept such limitation to gain some freedom already has their Freerunners in their pockets.

I so much want a free device and I completely agree with the spirit of the article, but it's unfortunately so damn wrong at technical level it hurts :(

If the open source baseband was even remotely feasible to do, open projects like Openmoko, OpenPhoenux (GTA04, Neo900) together with OsmocomBB would already come up with 100% open GSM device. The people working on those project dream to be able to do that, but they simply can't. OsmocomBB is practically a research project, as there are no practical use-cases for it to "normal user" (in most countries it's illegal to use modem with OsmocomBB on it unless you're operating it with your own BTS-lab network you got permission to set up for development or research purposes), and it only operates on very old devices with TI Calypso, as basically all of more modern basebands are cryptographically signed (TI Calypso was also supposed to be, but for some unknown reason that feature was disabled, probably due to misconfiguration at the factory - this is the only reason OsmocomBB was possible at all).

Unless we do lots of legal lobbying and raise much more resources than a company like Canonical has (trust me, building proper 4G modem is awfully hard and expensive. You have to comply to several thousands pages of protocol documentation and pass many certifications. Canonical probably could would be able to afford producing Ubuntu Edge, but they certainly won't be able to afford the modem development), it's much more helpful to look at projects like Neo900 ( http://neo900.org/ ) which aim for the best possible separation between APE and the baseband with built-in monitoring in case you suspect modem might be doing something malicious. In my opinion, this is the proper step forward the truly free mobile devices in our pockets, not shouting and demanding open basebands (even if we all, including Neo900 developers, dream about them).

Just drown out 3G signal near the victim and make it connect to your own 2G station. Piece of cake.

In fact, all you need is for instance some TI Calypso based phone, like Openmoko Neo Freerunner or some old Motorolas, and OsmocomBB firmware. And of course lack of fear when you're doing something like that illegally.

That "obscure alternative" is one of the only ones consisting of entirely free software. Instead of whining that something doesn't work you should rather help implementing what's missing, either by direct contributions, money donations or even just a good word to the developers. Otherwise the rarity of free mobile systems like SHR, QtMoko or Replicant will become even more rare and none of them will be ever usable for anyone else than hardcore geeks.