It's over 13 months now since I started to work for OpenMoko. Wednesday was my last day.
I'm not leaving with bad feelings. Still over the last months I disagreed with decisions and directions, got frustrated with the work I had to do. Not the best conditions for a productive work environment.
However I still like to see OpenMoko success. As open as possible mobile phone hardware on which I can flash all kind of software I like. Not fighting against vendor policies but having almost all options I like. Still sounds great to me.
Over the last 13 months I learned a lot. For both, coding and business. Working with some great people from the FOSS community from all over the world and with great taiwanese engineers. (Watch out for these guys, they are awesome but shy) Made new friends and had to deal with an interesting different culture.
It was an awesome but exhausting trip. It's over for now.
I plan to do no paid work for the next 1-2 months, perhaps even longer. In this time-frame I need to come back to the study life I had before and take some rest. Read some good books, hang out with friends and don't worry about deadlines.
After that we will see what kind of work will come in. At least it must be not as much time consuming as OpenMoko was. Need to focus on my studies.
Currently I'm with Mickey in a train back to Germany from Denmark. The last days I participated the Mobile Developer Days 2007. In contrast to the most other conferences I attend this one was not only about FOSS but more about developing software for mobile devices. Write applications in Python, Java, Open C, examples for location enabled applications, VoIP and rapid prototyping for artist are just a small extract of the program.
Mickey and me gave our talks about Open{Moko,EZX} and presented the community view in discussions.
Besides the different focus the event was also a lot smaller then the ones I usually attend. Around 40 people. So most of the attendees were speaker as well. Mixed up with the fact that many of the people are doing research in this area gave the conference a academic touch.
In the last weeks Mickey and me pondered if we really should attend as our travel and working schedules are pretty full, we did not got plane tickets and had to go two 10 hours train rides, etc.
In the end I'm happy we decided to go. Besides the talks especially the small group of people was a good place for interesting and informative discussions. Coming from the FOSS world and doing not much business besides OpenMoko it was quite interesting for me what people with a more commercial background are doing with mobile devices and what benefits and drawbacks they see in using FOSS for example.
During the days and nights we had some working session with normal OpenMoko stuff but also some hours on catching up with OpenEZX stuff. But that's another blogpost.
After having a busy time with university, OpenMoko and getting my partime freelance going I now are getting more relaxed and looking forward to the next two weeks which I will spend mostly on two conferences.
Next week starts with my flight to France. I'm giving a talk about free software on mobile phones. It covers mostly OpenEZX and OpenMoko, but also tries to give an overview about other projects in this area. As my talk is at the first day I'm looking forward for the other talks, visit Amiens and doing having some time for OpenMoko related work.
Coming back from France means having a half day and a night at home and jumping over to England again. GUADEC will be full of meeting people, having fun and making plans for the upcoming month. I'll fly together with Daniel and his girlfriend and meet up Mickey in Birmingham. But besides OpenMoko related discussions I really looking forward to meet people behind Gnome.
For my small home office I searched for a cheap duplex laser printer which can also make copies.
After some research I found the Brother DCP-8065DN. The price on the website is too high. I got mine for 490 Euro.
That is really cheap if you look at the features the beast offers me:
Besides the printer and copy features especially the duplex up to 50 sheets scan feature is just great.
Take a pile of paper you like to get rid of. Put it into the machine and you get a nice PDF uploaded to your FTP. Great. :)