Following up on my pledge to never buy routers that are not supported by OpenWRT, FreeWRT, or similar Free Software projects, I wish the same could be done for mobile phones, but I am not yet sure how.

Mobile phones suffer more from shitty software than many other devices, and their flaws are more painful because we interact with them so much. Recently, I wrote about the Hell'O'Moto that I found myself in when buying a Motorola phone. That is a mistake I certainly won't repeat anytime soon -- usually it takes me between 7.5 and 15 years to maybe give such companies another chance.

So I am actually looking into mobile phones again, trying to figure out what to get. While I decided to try Motorola because I was not willing to spend my money on supporting Nokias pro-software patent policy, I now found myself wondering whether to consider their E70 phone. It does have nice hardware design and -- unlike the Blackberry, for instance -- does not seem exclusively designed to make people dependent on Microsoft Windows.

So I was rather interested when The Register put online a review of the Nokia E70. The review starts very favorably with the hardware, including the battery lifetime, and then comes to the software. Here is what Andrew Orlowski had to say about it:

A special circle of Hell needs to be created for the souls behind
Nokia's new web browser. [...] The kindest thing to say is that it
makes for a great demo, showing off stamp-sized portions of full web
pages in their glorious colour.

But it's strictly for show. Web, as the browser's called, may as well
have been designed by people who have spent the past few years in a
time capsule, having only partial descriptions of the web fed through
to them in an ancient and forgotten language, with no Rosetta Stone to
help.

So it appears that Motorola does not have the monopoly to put its customers into software-induced hell. It seems that once more perfectly good hardware design is invalidated by bad software, which is all the more infuriating considering that in general we could fix this, if they'd let us! But in most cases they try to prevent or at least discourage this from happening -- and are not cooperative with people who try to make their products better, effectively helping them to sell more of them.

And by the way, Mr Orlowski, by making it better I did not mean that I wanted to put the proprietary Opera Browser on there that you seem to like so much and that I got the impression you were advertising for quite heavily in your article. I would definitely choose Free Software, and Free Software only. Just so you know. :)

Being in the fortunate situation that I can finally spend some time in Zürich to catch up on issues that were left unattended, like finishing the network infrastructure.

For this, I discovered OpenWRT, a GNU/Linux based firmware for routers that can be used like any other GNU/Linux operating system, including running sophisticated firewalls, Samba or Asterisk servers, Wikis, or whatever else you wanted to put on an embedded box. I also discovered another project called FreeWRT, which seems to be a spin-off of OpenWRT, aiming to support more hardware platforms, but they currently have no release out, so I could not try them.

The existance of these projects has changed my life to the better in a very fundamental way. Finally I can make my routers do what I actually want them to do, and not what some marketing person in some company thought you should want it to do according to their market segment and pricing calculations.

While all of that may be generally acceptable, I'd much rather get hardware with a good and sane default operating system and function set, but with the freedom to modify it to what I actually want, if I so choose.

And after I now found that freedom, I certainly won't go below it in the future, which translates into a very clear and simple message:

From now on, I will only buy routers that are supported by OpenWRT and/or FreeWRT -- or a similar Free Software project!

In fact I hope that other people will pick make this pledge their own and also put it up on the web, making sure that routers that do NOT offer you this freedom simply won't be selling very well.