But… the million man army! Seriously now, the only way for open source to work for projects exceeding in size a media player or video converter is if you are able to set up a fund for features you want to see. Volunteers will only get you so far. Otherwise, open source will always be the beggar on the corner waiting for the white knight (IBM, then Sun, now Google) to throw some pocket change or some source their way.

that’s only part of the problem. many of those on the list are not “community” OSes they were made by a company. The problem is that to make a successful smartphone you have to beat iOS’s ecosystem and maturity.even Android was not a contender by a long shot when it came it (it still isn’t IMO).
this is like swahili people trying to beat venetians at porcelain making.

What’s so magical about a “community” OS?

And did Android suddenly become on while I wasn’t looking?

my point is that these projects were not run by begging and they still bombed. the community ones bombed harder (openmoko)

Ah, I get the point. My bad …

OTOH one or two of these (eg Meego) were at least slightly interesting, rather than being an iOS knock-off like Android. Maybe the market can only deal with an iOS knock-off; maybe there’s just a failure of imagination here.

Mostly, Steve Ballmer’s celebrated quote applies here. “Developers, developers, developers!”

Beats me why HP didn’t build an app compiler for Web OS that took Cocoa and Objective-C (or whatever you need for iOS) and seamlessly turned the app into a WebOS one. I would have thought that was the obvious way to go.

i actually prefer the meego UI. i would buy a meego phone if it was available as I don’t run any “apps” and would just use it for the UI looks and making calls.