Open Phones?

Thursday the FOSSLC organised a conference named Free/Open Source Mobile Development in Waterloo. They invited three speakers, each working on a different platform, to talk about their projects and the advantages their platform have to offer for open source developers.

The first speaker was Jay Freeman, also known as Saurik, who is an important member of the free software community around the iPhone. He is the main developer of Cydia, a package manager for the iPhone, and Winterboard, an application that let you modify the appearance of your phone. Both run on jailbreaked phone. He mainly talked about Cydia and his effort to create an iPhone marketplace managed by the users as an alternative to Apple’s expensive marketplace. Saurik is a really intelligent person and an amazing programmer and his talk was really interesting. He used Veency, a VNC server he ported to the iPhone for his presentation so he could show us in real time on an iPhone what he was doing. He also gave a tutorial on Objective-C for the iPhone with an emphase on memory management that was interesting even if sometimes really complicated.

The next speaker was Jean-Michel Bouffard, a researcher at the Communications Research Center of Canada. His current project is called OpenMokast and is a really interesting one. The objective of the project is to build a cellphone that could take advantage of all the free data that flows over the air. With a lot of multimedia content being broadcasted over the air, this is an amazing idea. No need to go through your cellphone service provider to get video or audio. He integrated a usb antenna to the OpenMoko Freerunner and modified the Linux stack that runs the phone to capture de L-Band data. He can thus listen to the radio without having to pay any extra fees. OpenMoko is an amazing platform for this kind of project since not only is the software completly open source, but the hardware is also totally open with the design CAD files available. However, the platform is still not stable and he showed in his tutorial that it takes a lot of willpower to compile everything that is needed to write the most simple application.

The last speaker was Dilpreet Singh, one of the winner of the first Android Developer Challenge. He and his team designed the Life360 application, an Android application that allows you to track your family members and interact with them in different ways. He talked about the advantage of Android, the biggest being the fact that the platform is open, meaning that you have access to more features than with other platform like the iPhone’s platform. He also talked about the “Apache License catch” of the platform. This is, the software being under the Apache License, phone makers can decide to modify it, adding or deleting features, and add closed code. His tutorial was probably the more complete of the three speakers with a full walkthrough of how to write an Android application.

A pretty interesting panel discussion then followed. I won’t talk about it in details since a lot of different subjects have been discussed. For a video of the full discussion just follow this link.

Tags: Android, Free Software, iPhone, Mobile Devices, Open Source, OpenMoko, Software Development