A turning point for open gadgets?

The Economist recently ran an article on avoiding international roaming rates associated with cellphone use while traveling. Your editor's recent schedule has made him rather more than usually interested in that subject, so the article seemed worth a read. It seems that there are not a whole lot of truly viable solutions available at the moment; the recommended approach appears to be to get an unlocked GSM phone and buy SIM cards locally - not something one needs an Economist subscription to know about. Happily, the article concludes that "relief" is at hand; it then expends several paragraphs on just what form that relief will take:

The article notes that the openness of the platform means that users will be able to install applications without the approval (or knowledge) of their cellular providers. Those applications can include voice over IP tools which can work via a data connection through a local GSM provider, thus shorting out the roaming and long distance charges. But there's a lot more that can be done - things that no cellular provider ever dreamed of.

LWN readers will have often heard your editor's contention that truly open gadgets must, sooner or later, take over the market. But that takeover has been discouragingly slow in coming. Manufacturers prefer to keep their products closed and under their control; other forces, including pressures to support DRM schemes and regulatory issues, also come into play here. So, while we have more gadgets to play with than ever before, most of those gadgets cannot be hacked upon and extended to do interesting new things - at least, not without a serious effort on the community's part to crack them open.

Awareness of the problems associated with closed devices has grown far more slowly than many of us would like. Most consumers, it seems, are interested in devices that Just Work and have little interest in extending them. So there is little pressure in the market for more open devices, and, thus, little incentive for manufacturers to offer them.

The cellular industry may just be the place where this tide begins to turn. In the U.S., at least, this industry works under an exploitive and controlling model. Handsets are usually purchased through the provider, are locked to that provider, and lack any features which said provider worries could damage its revenue model. So even simple and obvious functions, like copying pictures from the handset onto its owner's computer, tend to be blocked. Voice over IP functionality which could be used to evade roaming charges in distant countries is entirely out of the question (though T-Mobile has just launched an interesting plan which enables free calls from WiFi hotspots).

The cellular telephone has become an increasingly personal and indispensable tool. It is picking up a number of interesting new capabilities. Almost everybody has one in the richer parts of the world - and, often, in the less-rich parts as well. Phones which carry arbitrary restrictions designed to further somebody else's agenda will get the attention of people who are not ordinarily tuned into software freedom issues. That will be especially true when freer alternatives are out there and their potential becomes clear.

So the OpenMoko phone may yet prove to be the revolutionary device that some of its backers have promised. Unlike every other Linux-based cellular phone produced so far, it will be an open system, free for anybody to extend in any number of ways. If this phone lives up to its potential at all, people will see what it can do and start asking why their shiny new handset can't be extended in the same ways. They might just start demanding a higher degree of openness from their vendors and/or providers. If we are lucky, purveyors of closed devices will start finding it harder to compete. Maybe, just maybe, the OpenMoko phone will succeed in teaching people about the value of free devices and, as a result, help bring an end to an era of hardware designed to serve the interests of people other than its owner.

[As to whether the OpenMoko will live up to its potential: LWN has ordered one of their early development devices with the idea of writing an article or two about it. Anybody who has been following that situation knows that OpenMoko's fulfillment operation is currently not living up to much of any potential. Stay tuned, hopefully we'll have a device to review sometime soon.]

---

(Log in to post comments)