While that's true, you have to bare in mind that the project barely made it past alpha stage and was anything but stable. So it's not really fair to compare OpenMoko to the matured interfaces we enjoy today.
Plus if you look at how long the iPhone was in development and compare that against the development time of OpenMoko, then I think you'll agree that what they achieved was impressive project given the lack of resources they had compared to businesses such as Apple and Google.
"Looked more like a replacement to early versions of Windows mobile."
Given that we're talking pre-iOS and Android, it's not really all that surprising. Back then, most smart phone OSs were pretty crap. Regardless of whether you believe that Apple innovated the mobile industry, there was a huge leap forward in OS design around then; and Openmoko pre-dates that leap.
>given the lack of resources they had compared to businesses such as Apple and Google.
I think this is exactly the kind of issue that crusso was speaking to. Richard Stallman et. al. don't have a realistic solution to this problem. "Just work for free" isn't realistic. "Just get paid by IBM" sounds good until you realize that you're essentially on IBM's IT staff and they happen to open source their tools. They're not producing the products that get ordinary people off the couch and opening their wallet. The closest they'll get is producing a single technical ingredient that someone else will use to make such a product.
That's sort of my point in that the "disruptive" products that really move the needle in terms of expectations seem to be produced as proprietary products first.
This means they get hype and first mover advantage which in turn means they get a chance to tie up the best deals for content etc and get lock-in.
Things often work out that way, but there are exceptions. For example Firefox raised expectations of what a good browser can be like. But then I guess you could argue that Firefox has enjoyed large contributions from Google and thus isn't a true community project either. So I'm not really sure where to draw the line.
However I don't want to sound argumentative as you do make a valid point there. It just wasn't clear from your earlier iPhone comparison that you were talking about disruptive products specifically (or perhaps I misread your post to mean that community-lead smart phones could never exist?). Either way, I think we essentially agree here :)
Plus if you look at how long the iPhone was in development and compare that against the development time of OpenMoko, then I think you'll agree that what they achieved was impressive project given the lack of resources they had compared to businesses such as Apple and Google.
"Looked more like a replacement to early versions of Windows mobile."
Given that we're talking pre-iOS and Android, it's not really all that surprising. Back then, most smart phone OSs were pretty crap. Regardless of whether you believe that Apple innovated the mobile industry, there was a huge leap forward in OS design around then; and Openmoko pre-dates that leap.