It's really, really paining me to watch the beating that the openmoko project is currently taking. I've been majorly into this idea for some time now, about half way through '07. FOSS is a brilliant thing, and it's only a matter of time before the telecommunications industry wakes up to that. After all, Linux sprouted from Unix which sprouted from a telco.
Sadly, it looks like the openmoko team has set the effort back a fair ways. It's been released before it was ready and Dave Fayram has pointed that out. I thought Dave gave a reasonably fair assesment. He doesn't seem to have spent much time with the manual, but most users don't. His review has unfortunately been leapt upon by every Apple fanboy out there and it'sgaining a life of it's own.
I'm a rank outsider, no involvement in the project whatsoever aside from voraciously reading news about it for the past 12 months. Frankly, it seems that it's been mismanaged by FIC. There has been a fair amount of disgruntlement coming from the developers working for the company. The fact that they switched from the original GTK platoform to the qtopia stack at the eleventh hour smacked of desperation.
This wouldn't really bother me if it wasn't for the fact that openmoko had gained so much media attention. So often you hear outlets talking about the triumverate of iPhone, Android and openmoko. Up until this week I've been really proud to see such a rabidly open source project be given that much airtime. It's frustrating to now find out that they weren't deserving of it.
I think those of us looking for an open source phone now need to turn towards the slightly-open-source-but-not-really Android, and hope like hell that something great comes out of Nokia's plans for opening up Symbian.