[Tinkerphones] ZeroPhone site offline

[H. Nikolaus Schaller]

> Am 05.01.2022 um 16:46 schrieb Dr. Michael Lauer <mickey at vanille.de>:
> 
> Hi Radek,
> 
>> If i was doing software for open phone i'd make basic monolithic telephony
>> 
>> app (calls, SMS) that works directly with the modem, with one HW hardcoded.
>> 
>> No plugins no frameworks just keep it simple.
> 
> This!
> 
> When I envisioned the system architecture of Openmoko, I tried to be a nice
> citizen with regards to existing components and versatility — otherwise I
> would not have started with DBus as the „collaboration API“ in the first place.
> 
> While this was great for education and empowering people to write cool custom
> dialers and components in all kinds of languages, it severely increased the complexity,
> latency, etc.
> 
> If I were to do this behemoth of a software stack like freesmartphone.org again, it
> would look pretty similar to what you just said. A monolithic
> component that takes care about the „features“ of the phone – period. If at all, with
> _very few_ – well defined – extension points for other software to „plug in“.

Well, CoreTelephony is such a monolithic component (wrapper)...

Note that it does not define how its internals are implemented.

It could run on a separate processor using some shared memory communication
or whatever is efficient. This allowed Apple have if from iOS 4 to iOS 15 and even
macOS 10.10 and later.

Sometimes I have the feeling that we are repeating the mistakes that Apple
didn't make right from the beginning 15 years ago :) Or in other words we are
not good enough in simply copying what is good.

Also note that some modem chips/modules would have a direct interface to
a microphone and a speaker. So everything would just be about controlling
the modem+audio subsystem. I.e. translating method calls to AT commands.

Indeed no reason for complexity.

> 
> In fact, now that I have a new programming language darling, I’d even love to
> do such a stack again from scratch…

Well my programming language darling is more than 35 years old and I did
already write a lot of such a stack from scratch:

https://git.goldelico.com/?p=mySTEP.git;a=tree;f=CoreTelephony

Unfortunately nobody did care about. Me as well :)

Maybe I should care more in the future since two big issues have been
solved:

a) mySTEP can now be compiled to run equally well on Debian Jessie up
to Buster (potentially beyond) and multiple SoC architectures
b) and a nasty memory management bug has been solved.

What I also should mention: it can (did) run on the LetuxOS version for
the PinePhone. But was not useable because there is no official modem
driver upstream and I wasn't able to integrate the downstream version.
So I simply could not turn the Modem on and check for AT commands.
 
> but time-wise/financially I can’t afford to do something
> like that any more :-(

The same for me :(

It was financially interesting when Openmoko started but nowadays
it has shrinked to an interesting hobby (eating too much time).

BR,
NIkolaus