I’m waiting for the Open Source Cell Phone by risa
I am one of those few folk - slippery and stubborn - still dancing evasive maneuveurs around the necessity of the cell phone. I’m not even sure why, except that I dislike phone conversations in the first place. Not true - actually, what I dislike is calling people and being called. The actual talking part is fine. I’m a chemically sensive person with an over active imagination - these two things about me have calmed in recent years, oozed toward normalcy from their frantic climax during my teenage years; when a spritz of rosewater to the face would turn me bright red and bumpy, burning painful; the smell of perfumes could send me into migraines lasting days, the feeling of a corporate hierarchy pressing around me at a mega store job would send me into lasting, lethargic depression until I got fired or quit. I’m more balanced now that I work freelance I think, and much less likely, lately, to feel as though my body’s been hijacked by a combination of physical and conceptual allergy. But still it’s possible my lingering dislike for the phone and cell phones in particular comes from a feeling of the control and capital lurking inside those invisible exchanges. I might not mind being at the beck and call of more technology if it were legitimately integrated into the open source circuits I use at home. I’d like everything in my life to give off the feeling of connectedness and orientation toward a wide idea of collective good. Does that sound like an awful lot to ask? I’m tired of the sterile posturing involved in pretending we are not- at every single level of our awesome high tech-ness - part of a complex messy, earthy ecosystem. It’s boring, and dated, and too late in the day.
Open source seems to move slow sometimes, because you’ll have less of the accelerated, focused development that comes with heaps of money being poured in a directed way into a small room. Open source projects are like a wave that takes a longer time to build, because it’s building across wider swaths of land, and in deeper depths of personal interest and involvement amoung independently motivated participants. Sort of like a tsunami - the natives can feel it coming, even if the tourists can’t. But less tragic, more uplifting. “A rising tide lifts all boats” as Sun likes to say.
And the rising tide at times feels slow. The need for a new thing must become clear and present for the phase transition to take effect that turns a project into a Firefox or Linux. Truly successful open source projects are commited to open standards and protocols, and this takes a longer time to get right then building one proprietary path, linking only the acceptable vendours. Instead of mapping out one route - like blasting through walls to lay down a traintrack through the middle of a problem - open source projects run recon through the hills for a long time, testing paths and blockages, building relationships with the other groups and gangs of implicated os programmers and hardware builders, dealing with the bugs found by the many eyes, and finding solutions that are fair to the lowest income bracket. This can allow for much divergence during the process and still make a long, quiet underground of mutual understanding and effort; and because it is not developed in conjunction with - or even response to- a simultanous marketing machine, development doesn’t get locked into a publicized promise, and few will know the change is coming ’till it comes.
Now it sounds like the open source cell phone standard might be coming soon, so I can tell myself that’s why I’ve been holding out:
A fully featured, fully open source mobile handset could help reduce the cost of mobile telecommunications and give users access to a rich set of low cost applications for texting, instant messaging and other uses. The approach stands in contrast to that taken by commercial developers — which are hoping that consumers in the mobile phone market will gravitate to well known brands that offer a familiar user experience and full support.
On Thursday, Microsoft released details of its Windows Mobile 6 operating system — code named Crossbow–for handhelds and phones. It’s designed to extend some of the features and functions of the Windows Vista desktop to the cellular phone arena.
“Open Source Mobile Phone on the way” - Paul McDougal
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