SHR Project gets a successful presentation at Openmobility conference

Openmobility conference was held on Saturday April 24th 2010 at the University of Tomas Bata, Zlin, Czech Republic. Initiated by the Czech Openmoko community and organized by group led by Martin Holec (aka Martix), the day long program featured several interesting presentations, for example Open Hardware (OpenMoko, Wikireader...), SHR, Touch Book, Nokia N900, Android, Openstreetmap, QTMoko and more. The conference was also hosting a Freerunner rework party where bass fix, GSM buzz fix and 1024 recamping fix were performed.

QTMoko was presented by it's author Radek Polak. Radek, being a very active and passionate user and maintainer of the successful QT Extended/ GNU Debian based distribution, shared his view and involvement in the project. Greatly enjoying himself to upkeep a distribution that serves his needs, he is happy others are able to use and be happy from his work.

Android and N900 phones were presented by their users who were thrilled by the possibilities of the hardware and by the continuing process of development supported by the strong corporate bodies behind (Google and Nokia). Huge numbers of applications provided by the surrounded community is apparently an important part of the phones' ekosystem and is appreciated by the common users.

SHR Project was presented by one of the project members Martin Jansa (aka JaMa). Clear informative presentation gave comprehensive look into the inside structure of the project, building process, features, community and it's involvement, as well as about history future plans. JaMa, being deeply involved in the building and testing processes was confidently answering questions of several interested visitors of the conference.

Here is what has become very clear after the full day of presentations:

Where corporate driven projects were presented by the end users, barely scratching the surface of the complexity of maintaining a competitive phone system and for whom it was very hard to articulate the reasoning, possibilities or even plans, and where presentation of a beautiful but one and only man show maintenance of discontinued phone stack could be seen, SHR was the only presented distribution project that had both the power and the beauty of living organism with already existing community involvement to the deepest levels all across the system. SHR (who is also suffering the lack of manpower) is at this point the center of the Freerunner's universe and ideally would be the focal point of all developers for (not only) the Neo phones.

With the recent successful merge with the direct OpenEmbedded branch, future building possibilities were safeguarded, moving us a great leap forward and providing an easily build-able system with many active developers, allowing participation at any time - welcomed and greatly appreciated community involvement is accepted with sincere thoughts for more opened future, not with superficial hopes of greater sales and higher Nasdaq ratings.

SHR at the Openmobility was evidently an icing on the cake and a confirmation that the movement for freeing the phone is still alive. Thank you Jama for the long trip from Prague and hope to see you here again next year!