Did you happen to notice that the section 5 in that blog post was possibly talking about you? Read especially carefully the last paragraph of it. The article was well-thought and was not to defend GNOME but actually the best piece of writing I've seen in a long time. Too bad there are dismissive and nonconstructive people in at least /. discussion boards, always.

One can make a free, non patent-encumbered implementation of Flash player, and the specifications can be nowadays freely be used to do that. So the de-facto implementation is not open, but it's not restricted like H.264.

I think they are merely backing up step by step. First they only supported permissive licenses, since they could take it and close it themselves. Now the next step is GPLv2, since they clearly cannot oppose it. The new things seems to be anti-GPLv3 - that is, continuing the usual software restriction business by making open source non-open via software patents.

But clearly it's a step forwards again, a forced one. And from business perspective and keeping their existing business model they are doing just the right thing, giving up only when it's absolutely necessary, while keeping their public picture as shiny as possible. I just think we are far from getting to the point that the old proprietary software houses wouldn't try to take away the freedoms of the free software by any means possible. If only the US would lead the way with evaporating software patents...

I think the title and description give a false, tabloid-like sensational impression. Neo FreeRunner will continue to sale, and a new revision of it (A7) will even hit the shelves soon.

What has been stalled is the development of the successor of FreeRunner, formerly known as GTA03. It will not ship in 2009.

Anyway, I hope they will stay in business as they are still the only one doing a phone that is really usable as a phone with eg. Debian or whatever. It would be perfectly fine if they now scrapped _all_ their non-hw & non-kernel efforts. They are lousy at handling a software community or coding UI anyway.

As can be guessed, I'm a happy user of FreeRunner as my only daily phone, and it would be sad if one day I would be forced to use a less free phone. And yes, Android dev phone is quite far from Openmoko in reality... it's not like buying a new computer and installing a distro of your choice on it like it is with Neo.

I was just thinking the same. It's not really a competitor to Wikipedia in a larger context, even though it might have some value to a random surfer.

The problem with (originally) Android-based devices is that their power management is done in a completely non-standard way. It's not that it would not be open, but passing tokenized dead mice through a wormhole is quite a pain. Will there be enough community interest to actually ever put the power management to a level that can be used by non-Android distributions?

This is where the Neo FreeRunner shines - not only you can install Debian (or Gentoo) on the device, but you can actually use it as your daily phone / GPS device / music player to a similar extent you can use the Openmoko distribution.

It's not just, or it should not just be a "fun hack" to install Debian on your phone - the point should be that you can use your phone with Debian, similar to what you done on your desktop/laptop computer. Of course, there should not be any need to hack the phone before being able to install own programs on it, but there is already the Android dev phone available so that's not the problem with Google phones.

As the game is based on open source box2d physics engine, there are also other games with partially similar feel and game play. Crayon Physics was the one with the original idea, though.

Nokia Internet Tablet and Openmoko Neo FreeRunner owners might be interested in Numpty Physics: http://numptyphysics.garage.maemo.org/ & http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/rantalai/freerunner/numptyphysics/