Moderator: Michael Shiloh, OpenMoko.org

OpenMoko is an open ubiquitous computing software platform, and a family of quite open hardware platforms. All the source code and the software development environment are freely downloadable.

The Product Manager, Sean Moss-Pultz, and his company, FIC, are taking a revolutionary approach. They want to bring on the upcoming ubiquitous computing revolution. They recognize that no one can predict what products will be sold after the revolution (what will these ubiquitous computers do? how will we interract with them? how will they help us?) and so their philosophy is to build the platform, make it completely open source, and let the imagination and creativity of the open source community help discover the future.

The first device of this project (the Neo 1973) is a smart cellphone (with BlueTooth, GSM, GPRS, AGPS, VGA (640 x 480) touchscreen, and USB port) but this is not a cellphone project. There is a roadmap with some future devices, but the real goal is to enable applications that have yet to be discovered, and then to create the appropriate hardware to support those applications.

The hardware is not entirely open, partially because it incorporates some chips whose usage is under NDA. The block diagram of the hardware, the chip identification, and the APIs for all hardware is published.

Based on Linux, X, and GTK, OpenMoko provides a set of libraries, widgets, interfaces, APIs, and all the good stuff to make it easy to use, all of it open source.

At this BOF session we will show the Neo 1973, describe the hardware and software architecture, and explore the source code. Depending on interest, we may write a new application, compile, and download into the phone.