OpenMoko: Completely Open Mobile Computing Software Platform

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.

Sean Moss-Pultz, founder of OpenMoko, is taking a revolutionary approach to welcome the ubiquitous computing revolution. OpenMoko recognizes that no one can predict what products will exist after the revolution (what will these ubiquitous computers do?  how will we interact with them? how will they help us?) and so our philosophy is to build the platform, make it completely open source, and let the imagination and creativity of the open source community help us discover the future.

The first device of this project (the Neo 1973) is a smart cellphone (with BlueTooth, GSM, GPRS, AGPS, WiFi, 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.

In this talk we will introduce the OpenMoko project and philosophy in the context of the present mobile computing landscape. We will discuss the relationship of OpenMoko the company to the larger open source community of OpenMoko developers, and how we work with the open source community. Finally, we will present the project hardware and software technical details.