Igor’s blog » openmoko

Canada to Sell Spectrum to Wireless Newcomers

Igor — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:08:33 +0000

From Michael Geist’s Blog (and others): Canada to Create Spectrum Set Aside in Wireless Auction

 Industry Minister Jim Prentice has just announced that the government
 will put in place measures as part of the forthcoming spectrum auction
 to encourage greater competition within the Canadian wireless market.
 Prentice acknowledged that Canadian wireless pricing is too high,
 particularly for data.

Whoa. I’ve been huffing and puffing about Canada’s ridicu-crazy data rates and the general oligopoly in the wireless industry for a couple of years, so this comes as a very welcome announcement.

It’ll be interesting what comes out of this. In particular with OpenMoko becoming usable for phone use, reasonable data rates will make a huge difference in adoption of phones like this. Google’s Android is also really interesting. What I’m wondering is if any of the newcomers that might bid on/win spectrum will use these new open phones and embrace openness as a competitive advantage against the old Bell/Rogers/Telus triumvirate. I sure hope so. I think it’s really important for these player (the Open Handset Alliance, and OpenMoko/Fic) to lobby new entrants to use their technologies in this way. Newcomers win (maybe). OHA/OpenMoko win (for sure). Consumers win (for sure). Fun times, fun times.

Ontario Linux Fest

Igor — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 03:05:13 +0000

Yesterday I was at the first ever Ontario Linux Fest, manning the Eclipse booth together with Remy. Also hung out with a whole bunch of people from Red Hat’s Toronto office: Sami, Lillian, Ben, Andrew, Behdad, Tom and Matt. I think the conference was great. It was pretty small and intimate and didn’t feel like LinuxWorld; which I think is way too huge.

You can see some photos at Andrew’s blog post. I especially like this one :

Eclipse Booth

We had a whole bunch of people come by the Eclipse booth, and to my surprise at least 60% didn’t even know what Eclipse was. Another 20% kinda knew what it was but never tried it. The rest knew what it was and at least have tried it once. Only a few people actually used Eclipse. That was kind of surprising to me, even though I knew that Eclipse wasn’t very well received by the Linux crowd. Andrew‘s presentation was well received from what I heard, so hopefully that will help with spreading the word about Eclipse. I think that the efforts of the Eclipse linux distros project is well worth it, and will help really help people use Eclipse on Linux.

OpenMoko

I had my Neo1973 with me and was playing around with it in the booth most of the day. A *lot* of people came by because they saw it and wanted to play around with it too. So that was fun. Yesterday I flashed the latest OpenMoko image to the phone and was actually able to make phone calls out of the box, which was very exciting. I even used the phone all day as a cell phone, and was surprised how long the batter actually lasted: most of the day. Of course I connected it to the computer once in a while because I was shuttling files back and forth. But since I always have my laptop with me anyway, that’s not a problem so I hope to start using the phone full time soon.

I think I’m also going to go to FSOSS, since it looks pretty interesting and it’s going to be a good break from school. See you there.

Ontario Linux Fest tomorrow

Igor — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 23:25:51 +0000

Tomorrow I’m going to be manning the Eclipse booth at the Ontario Linux Fest, together with Remy. That should be a good break from doing school work all the time.

There’s going to be a pretty huge turnout of Red Hat folks from Toronto , so it’s going to be fun seeing everyone again.

I’m also going to have my Neo 1973 phone there (which is currently on loan to Sami). Since the Fedora and Eclipse booths are right next to each other I hope Sami and I can have a lot of fun playing with it.

Come say hi if you’re there!