Everybody's heard the hype about the closed-source vunderkind cell phone that is supposed to "revolutionize" the industry. And maybe it will do well in the mass "consumer" market. But there is an open-source phone that has many of the same features - including a full-sized touch screen - but also has a full open-source telephony stack, runs Linux, and is going on sale at about the same time. Not to mention: about half the price for an unlocked GSM worldphone - meaning you can use it anywhere, almost immediately. See the wiki site and check back at the buying site. Just bear in mind that a lot of the software here is unfinished - open source geeks love to finish stuff - whereas the iPhone software is at least ready for Apple to release to the iPublic.

After I wrote this, it appears that Globe & Mail Technology Writer Jack Kapica agrees with me.

The Thecus N2100 sits idle in a corner, because the vendor changed the software in a way that breaks the ability to install most open-source OSes. 

The OpenBSD install, like many others, depends on setting certain firmware commands to be saved in the flash memory, and executed at boot time. This worked nicely on the versions of Thecus that the OpenBSD support was developed for, but in current versions (1.93+, including mine) Thecus modified the firmware to still save these commands, but to ignore them at boot time and use their "standard" ones.  They also removed the source code of previous versions from their web site, making it very difficult for even advanced developers to figure out how to revert this unfortunate change. They have also refused to provide information on how to fix it, saying I must contact my reseller (since I bought it used, there is no reseller).  I have been told that other open source projects are having similar problems, so it's not just OpenBSD that's affected.

Until Thecus changes this code back, so it actually honors the fconfig boot script settings, I can not advise buying this unit. If you want a small standalone unit, consider Soekris instead.

The Thecus I wrote about previously is partly up and running.  The OpenBSD install, unlike that for Debian, requires use of a serial console. The serial port was designed into these devices primarily for debugging, not what a consumer appliance needs.  So nowadays the manufacturer saves a few pennies on each unit by not soldering the internal connector in place.  But at least the holes are there.  The older units have a 10-pin header (with one pin removed) on the back of the disk circuit board.  The newer ones only have a set of 9 holes for you to solder in your own header.  Since mine came sans header, I just installed one.  I used a right-angle header since the ribbon cable I had was straight, so the angled header leaves more room for air flow at the back of the unit.  Connect a ribbon cable, plug the other end into a computer's serial port, and boot; you should see some textual chatter. Right?  Right in theory. But not necessarily in practice. In fact, it's about 50-50...

The ribbon cable that connects from the header on the disk board to the serial cable or the serial port on the computer is of the same type as used on older i386 PCs, but there are two different types of 10-pin IDC to DB-9M ribbon cable in use, which look identical (the differences are hidden inside the DB-9 connector).  Trust the "pee cee" industry to devise two totally different and incompatible cables and not provide a standard marking for them.  Details on these cables have been committed to the OpenBSD installation document for the Armish.

So now I can see bootup messages, and interact with "RedBoot", the firmware boot loader these machines use. 

RedBoot(tm) bootstrap and debug environment [ROM]
Red Hat certified release, version 1.93 - built 17:25:00, Feb  6 2007

Platform: THECUS N2100 (IOP80219)
Copyright (C) 2000, 2001, 2002, Red Hat, Inc.

RAM: 0x00000000-0x08000000, 0x0004b890-0x07fd1000 available, total: 128 MB
FLASH: 0xf0000000 - 0xf1000000, 128 blocks of 0x00020000 bytes each.
== Executing boot script in 3.000 seconds - enter ^C to abort
^C
RedBoot>

The next step was to install a hard drive as per the vendor documentation and OpenBSD as per those notes. These both went smoothly. The last step will be to make it automatically boot up when powered on...

When I mentioned on a mailing list that I don't use Skype because it's closed source both at the protocol level and at the code level, and further they don't even provide binaries for OpenBSD, a colleague on that list wrote back:

This is pretty strange... Are you on strike or something? Do you
use any non-open source products?

I wrote back that no, I actually do not, "at least on computers where I care about security". That is, of course, all my computers. What is so "strange" about using open source software?  It's free to use, and the code is readily available so people can look at it, find flaws and repair them.  That's not to say that people can't find flaws without source - just look at all the MS-Windows viruses, worms, etc. - but it is easier to repair them with source code. And it's not to say that open source software is without its share of aggravations: OpenOffice.org has some "interesting" issues when trying to print from its slide show program, for example. And "impress" nowhere as flashy nor as complete as Keynote, which I did use for a while. On the other hand, closed-source software has those annoyances too; O'Reilly has an entire "annoyances" book series on them, after all. Furthermore, closed software can be and has been a way of hiding illicit functionality: certain large OS vendors have been caught spying illegally on their customers, for example.

I conclude that open source software is likely to be more secure than closed source, and I choose to live my life according to what I believe. Is that what's strange? How does one work to make the world a better place, if not by living what you believe?