Recent press articles like indicate that today's users of smartphones are effectively under possibly real-time surveillance for their whereabouts. This, in my opinion, greaty diminuishes the value of such gadgets, as that is a gross invasion of privacy. It does illustrate, however, that free software projects for mobile devices really need a push, and that the users should insist on rooting, or jailbreaking, their phones to gain the ability to install their own operating system software. Now we "only" need viable operating system software for our phones, but on that front, things look a little dim.

After the downturn in the OpenMoko project, the best bets may be a community-administrated version of Android, or a current version of SHR, if Google should obstruct the creation of a "Community-Android". But in the longer run, there'll be no alternative to having fully-open operating systems for mobile phones, like we already have on the desktop or on server. Let's hope that the developers achieve that before companies manage to finally lock down all devices.

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