A few people have asked me at various times for a comparison of the  OpenMoko and Android cell phone projects. Given that I advocate for the former, and also for Java which is (and is not) the base language of the latter, I am expected to be able to say something intelligible by way of comparison. So here goes.

Android is a project spearheaded by Google to make an open-source phone. It uses Linux and its own Dalvik virtual machine, and applications are written in Java against the Android API and compiled down to Dalvik bytecode. Android does not expose the rest of the Linux services and does not support other programming languages. Android phones are available from a few carriers.

Openmoko, funded by Openmoko.com, is at the other end of the spectrum: it also uses Linux, but exposes all of it to the developer. The "main" stack of phone apps has been re-written several times, using various X-based toolkits. The "official" OM2009 stack is in large part written in Python. C/C++, Java and Perl are all available. Openmoko phones are available from Openmoko.com. However, because it is all open source:

• you can run Android on Openmoko hardware;
• you could (people have) run Openmoko software on other devices, including Palm PDAs, other Linux phones, and software emulators;
• you can probably run Openmoko software on Android hardware;
• you can run QTopia on Openmoko hardware;
• you can run one of half a dozen Linux distributions on your Openmoko hardware;
• you can (eventually) run other OSes such as OpenBSD on Openmoko hardware;
• etc.

From one point of view, they are not enemies. Both support the open source model. But as Openmoko developers have pointed out some time back, Android sits on top of Linux, abandoning most of the open source world and reinventing its own universe. Openmoko embraces all existing open source projects and any new open source comers. As a single example, communicating to your Openmoko phone from a desktop/laptop computer consists merly of running the industry-standard ssh and scp programs, included with every *Nix and readily available for those other OSes that need them. Talking to your Android phone requires finding, installing, and figuring out how to use an ad-hoc program called "adb" (at least the third use of this name, after Unix' Algol/Another DeBugger and Apple's Desktop Bus).

From another point of view, of course, they are competing. Competing for market share (neither has made much inroads in the consumer space). Competing for developer mindshare. Android tends to get a lot more press, partly because of the "big G" lineage.

People sometimes ask if I think Openmoko should just fold up and go on to something different, given how far ahead Android has moved? I've never been a fan of quitting while you're behind. Imagine if Linus Torvalds had quit while Unix was ahead; his then-little school project would never have seen the light of day, and we'd all be running BSD and System V. Nothing wrong with those - BSD was already on its way to becoming a full open source *Nix, as represented today by OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD - but things would be rather different in what is now the Linux community, to say the least. Or if Bill Gates had quit while IBM was ahead. Or if Steve Jobs had quit while MS-Windows was ahead. Or if the U.S. had quit the space race when the Russians launched Sputnik. You get the idea. Don't quit while you're behind, nor when you're ahead. As Nathaniel Branden once put it, "a beating heart is a living heart" - so keep on pumping!

And, at any rate, the "real" release of Openmoko software, OM.2009, is almost upon us; I am running a beta of it on my Freerunner (GTA02), and it's actually usable as a cell phone. Butt-ugly compared to some of the earlier releases, but it "just works". Formal release is expected this summer.

Every web site needs to keep improving, and your obd't servant is no different. I started almost exactly a year ago by replacing the old blog software with Pebble. Then I got busy with real work, and had to put aside site maintenance. Around the beginning of this year I was able to modernize both the home page of darwinsys.com (making it new and graphical) and the layout of the rest of the main site. This week, I re-did the Java Web Frameworks site, which has gone from coyote-ugly to fairly modern looking, after being re-implemented using the Seam framework. So, I am now running Seam ("war deployment" option) on Tomcat in production.

At the same time, I had to upgrade the Tomcat web server from 5.5 to 6.0, which went fairly smoothly, although there may be a few little bits that need a boost.

I just created a Java application that is needed on several platforms, one of which, alas, is the ubituitous and ill-designed Microsoft Windows XP.  In the project there are some classes that are auxilliary to the main program. Naturally enough I created a package for these called "aux". In Java a package name is also used as a directory name when the files are stored outside of archives, as they are during development. Hmmm. "aux".  I know that Apple Computer long ago had a UNIX version called A/UX, but I didn't know anybody else had dibs on the name. But it seems Bill Gates was after Apple even back when MS-DOS was being cloned from CP/M-86. For it turns out that "aux" is a reserved filename, not just in MS-DOS, but even today in Windows XP (for all I know and don't care so please don't tell me, Vista too). It's because "aux:" is a device name, and the system is too scatterbrained to tell whether you mean that, or a file, if you just type "aux". The result is that WinZip was unable to restore all the files in this package; so I had to waste about half an hour adapting to this (including copying these files again, changing their package name, changing all the files that refer to them, making sure the changes made it back to my real OS (no extra points if you can guess which one it is) and get committed into my source repo so that I don't have to put up with this "hideous botch" ever again. Until next time we meet some screw loose in the M$ universe, that is.

CNN quotes former US Veep Dick Cheney defending the unimaginable trillion-dollar deficit left behind by his administration - much of which was spent on the unwinnable war in Iraq - by saying ""All of these things required us to spend money that we had not originally planned to spend, or weren't originally part of the budget, ... Stuff happens. And the administration has to be able to respond to that, and we did." Stuff happens? You lie and cheat and break laws to get your country entrapped in a thousand-billion-dollar foreign war and all you can say is "Stuff happens?" Just gimme a break - if you can't admit you got caught breaking the law and lying on a far, far greater scale than Watergate - then just be quiet. Don't say anything. Put a lit on it. Or go hunting by yourself.

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South of the border, Glenn Greenwald has been doing a pretty good job of showing how mainstream US journalists not only no longer expose law- and constitution-breaking by upper-echelon politicians, but actively support, encourage, condone and support it in their writings. And, about that country's vicious two-tier justice system.

Meanwhile, north of the border, we have a new federal budget. Today on the news, one of our darling Opposition critics was complaining about the Prime Minister's "tax gimmicks" - Harper plans to cut taxes as part of a package to get people spending. Calling this a "tax gimmick" is vicious - money collected by taxes does not originally and automatically belong to the Almighty State - it is taken by force of law from the people that own it. A personal income tax cut, for example, leaves more money in the hands of middle class and working poor. The "gimmick" is in taking this money away from them, then giving it to failing multi-nationals that are probably going down anyway (both because they have totally failed to renew and revitalize their business processes and their products, and because they're being bled out by the labour unions). These are the same multi-nationals whose US CEOs flew to Washington to beg... each in their own private executive jet. A gimmick like that, we don't need. In either country.