Recent blog entries for qubit

Official Palm Pre FOSS site coming in 2 weeks

The Palm people responded to my email very quickly, telling me that the barebones version of the palm pre FOSS site is up, and will be populated with source and packages in about 2 weeks.

I haven't heard anything yet on how locked down the phone will be. The initial version of the phone is CDMA, but a GSM version is under development. Hopefully people will be able to reimage the device to load a new OS and will not be thwarted by some kind of tivoization.

I'm still trying to hunt down the Palm Pre kernel sources. I figure that they have to release them, at least to people who purchased the Pre, however I'm not finding any love up on the Palm Dev site.

Matthew Garrett's post about the Pre root filesystem is very interesting. Hopefully if the community can get enough information about the hardware then we can replace the proprietary webOS with a Free Software operating system, although I expect that this could take a fair amount of work.

The Freerunner was a great idea, but it sounds like it was never stable enough for Free Software supporters to justify purchasing it as an (expensive) primary cell phone. I'm hoping that the Pre can be the first stable, Free-Software-only phone out there. I like the idea of open hardware, but if we have to take baby steps and have a Free Software phone first, then let's at least make some headway.

Free Software starts in your pocket -- musings on how to fund Free Software projects and local nonprofits with what's in your pocket.

I'll probably post various bits about Free Software, using hardware with Free Software, and trying to deal with difficult people on my blog.

First post!

I mean, well, technically it is the....

Anyhow, I probably have lots to say. But perhaps not now. It probably will be nice to have a blog here so that I can jot down some useful ideas about Free Software and the various bits and pieces I'm contributing (or perhaps more likely, thinking about contributing) to projects.

Two biggies that I'll expand on later:

  • Database of hardware with notes on: support, how "nice" a vendor is, level of docs, etc...
  • New methods of drumming up donations to Free Software projects

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