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Freeing your phone: Q&A with Sean Moss-Pultz, president of OpenMoko, Part II
Eric Mah, DIGITIMES, Taipei [Thursday 6 December 2007]
Google's announcement of Android in early November brought a lot of press to the idea of an open handset platform. Such an idea, however, is not new and OpenMoko is one company that has been publicly pursuing such a goal for more than a year. Digitimes had the opportunity to talk with Sean Moss-Pultz, president of OpenMoko, about the latest developments at the company and what effect Android will have on the project. This is part two of a two-part interview. Part one appeared on December 4. Q: With OpenMoko being developed on the Neo platform, doesn't this tie people to this particular platform? A: Actually, no. OpenMoko has already been ported to Motorola smartphones, the Palm Treo and a couple of HTC phones. Now, it doesn't run as well as it does on the Neo because we are constantly focused on optimizing for our hardware, but we are not trying to lock the software down to our hardware. We want to be a product company. You could say I would love to be the Nintendo of the mobile world – a company that makes creative, fun products that people just love to use. I think the mobile phone is not creative and it's not fun. People just carry them around. Mobile phones are just a tool for most people. I want to make the mobile phone fun. I want to make it possible for you to personalize your phone any way you want to. That's the goal of OpenMoko right now. Q: Do you see Android affecting the adoption of OpenMoko? A: If people really like Android, I'm sure they'll just port it to OpenMoko. We are open hardware. Anyone who wants to can take their software stack and port it to us. Trolltech was developing an open source phone called the Greenphone, but they recently abandoned their efforts to make hardware and are going to use the Neo. Their great framework, Qtopia, runs right now on our hardware. I don't see any reason why Android wouldn't be very similar. If someone wants to develop Android stuff, you're going to need an open device that runs a Linux kernel. I don't know of very many devices that do that right now besides us. I don't view Android by any means as a competitor. We are trying to make a product. Again, let the people chose what they want. Q: What compelling reasons can OpenMoko offer to persuade people to primarily develop for it and then convert applications to Android rather than the other way round? A: We are always going to be open. And by open, it's completely 100% open. Our kernel is always going to be based on GPL (General Public License), our library is always LGPL (Lesser General Public License) so you're free to develop if you want closed applications on top of that. Our company is built around the idea that we're going to make products that have open software. It's still very uncertain what the directions of other platforms are going to be. Are they really going to be completely open or are they closing some things off for their own benefit? It's impossible to tell at the moment. With us, right now, you can get the entire software stack and do anything you want with it. We are going to make great products and it's going to run free software. Q: Are you worried that Google is going to run away with all the developers? A: No, we've got a great bunch of community members who really enjoy working with us on these devices. I'm not worried about a big commercial company with lots of money paying them to go work on what they tell them to work on. People will be motivated by what they want to do. As a company we will always try to be as close as possible to our customers, figuring out what they want so we can make it for them first. I think Google getting into the market at this point is great. What they talk about are the ideas we have been working on now for quite some time. It's great to have more people help educate the regular consumer why it's important to have more power over your phone. Q: Can you elaborate a little more about OpenMoko in terms of the company's business model and strategies? A: As a company, we have two revenue streams. The first is selling our own branded devices, these Neo devices. The second is what I like to call "Coachbuilt." If you're an automotive buff you'll remember back in the early 40s and 50s some companies started up that took General Motors automobiles, took off the exterior and interior and put their own design and style to the cars and sold them as custom cars. We have this hardware that is open and we have software that powers that. We partner with other companies who put their applications on top of OpenMoko and make their own industrial design and turn it into a consumer product. In December, you will see a company by the name of Dash in Silicon Valley that will produce the world's first Internet-connected GPS navigation device. So, think of TomTom but Internet connected. If you want, you can not only search for the nearest gas stations, but you can search for the cheapest gas station. You can search for movies showing around you and you can see today's show times. The Dash uses GPRS to pull the information back and fourth between their servers. On the lower level it runs the OpenMoko software stack and the hardware is basically just a remixed version of the Neo. Dash of course made the application themselves. They'll be showing the device at CES 2008 and should be in mass production by early first or second quarter. Q: In this "Coachbuilt" model are you implementing a revenue sharing or licensing scheme? A: It's a partnership, but it's more like an ODM model. Customers give us an idea of what they want from a design standpoint and we build it for them. We do all the manufacturing. Q: Roughly, how many products do you plan to ship in 2008? A: We will only do two or three products a year. We are a small company so we are extremely careful about whom we work with. We want to work with people who are leaders and are extremely innovative. We also plan to put out one or two new Neo devices a year. Again, we are trying to make great devices with free software. We'll be increasingly focused on specific applications. Q: Do you plan on partnering with other manufacturers in addition to FIC? A: At this moment we don't really need to. We want to contribute something of value first before we partner with others. We want to build our own identity and we believe we can do this by building great devices. Q: What can we expect from OpenMoko in 2008? A: You are definitely going to see some new devices from us and a much bigger focus on making development easier. It's a huge effort to get a completely open source software stack up and running and I think we have done a good job of this, so the focus now is to make this easier for people to use. So, next year you'll see a big focus on tools, on documentation, and on organizing the community efforts more. Basically we'll look to simplify things all around from the software side to the marketing. Focusing on what it means to free your phone and how to do it. Q: What has been your biggest challenge in leading OpenMoko? A: From a business side, things need to be cold blooded. Profits and sales figures talk for themselves. From a community perspective, things are about passion. People work on things in the community because they love to, it's their hobby. We created this company that tries to balance the passion of the community with the cold-blooded reality of business. Quite a few people on our payroll have done open source development for 10-15 years, and they have all kinds of ideas of how things should be done. On the business side we need to be extremely pragmatic, we need to earn money. The biggest challenge is how to get all these heads together and not clash. Q: Any closing comments? A: If you look at the open source world, there is a phenomenal amount of code to pull from to use. We do most of our development in the C programming language. C is a very low-level language and it's very difficult to have someone new come and get involved with it and get excited about it. It takes so long to do basic things, especially in the applications space, the UI space. Personally, my background comes from graphics and interactive design. What I'm most attracted to is combining design with technology. We want to hear from people how to make a phone that is easy to program for. If you recall the programmable calculator, it was a device that had this whole powerful subsystem that you could change. It was successful because you could pick it up and immediately use it and then slowly get into more complex functions. If you wanted to get into any development in the open source world, even for OpenMoko, the learning curve is way too steep, in my opinion. So, how do we make the phone like the programmable calculator? I think this is the big challenge for us moving forward. How do we make it so we can build bridges between the kernel hackers all the way up to the designers, the graphics designers and the interface architects? How do we get these two worlds to meet and talk in an open source fashion? These are all questions that I honestly don't have a good answer for yet. I hope that by having an open device, an open platform and by watching and listening, we can find the people out there that can bridge that gap. 
Sean Moss-Pultz, president of OpenMoko with a Neo 1973 handset
Photo: Eric Mah, Digitimes, November 2007
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