I was thinking today, whenever I hear Linux, I straight away think open source... so there'll be loads of clever boffins out there fixing any problems, making it a much better device etc.

I've got a GP2X and a N770, both of them don't really have much in the way of 3rd party replacement OS's/distro since most of the programs don't appear to be open source etc

Do you think we'll ever get a completely open device (and software) that people can improve to no end?

As discussed in another thread here (under Competitors) there are such projects going on, some for a while. Most open-source hardware projects though actually live in between software and hardware, such as open logic specs for FPGA chips. I happen to think open source communication devices are going to be much more problematic than hardcore devotees assume. We'll see...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_hardware

Well there is the Openmoko folks. If I get it right they opensourced pretty much everything. And they say they'll make devices that are not a phone. So I guess some sort of Internettablet.

Oh and there is alternative firmware for the N800. There is Pokylinux http://www.pokylinux.org/ and you can download a kernel and a rootfs from http://pokylinux.org/releases/blinky-3.0/

Has anyone tried this?

I just tried it a few hours ago.
Only the D-Pad works in term of hardware buttons.
Suspend/resume is done via console.
Wlan has to be enabled in some way, as it isn't by default.
Didn't test audio as there is nothing playing mp3s.

I realy like the greeny theme and the text bootup.

It looks more like an exotic alternative, rather than usable environment.

Yes, I believe we will. I think the current situation with quite a lot of non-free components is because its a small market and 3rd party hardware manufacturers (the companies Nokia buys the components from) can still get away with proprietary drivers and/or not making their hardware specs available to developers.

As the market evolves (and this is what's happening right now), some manufacturers might find providing free drivers is what puts them ahead of the competition. This, in return, will put pressure on the others, too.

There might always be non-free software on top of everything else (like companies trying to have everything closed&locked that makes up the look and feel of the user interface), but this is trivial then.

You should be aware, though, that being "open source" is not whats really important. Being able to have a look at the source code has no value as long as you're not allowed to change/re-use/distribute/... it. So what really matters is the license.

Completely agreewith the last lines. I am paid to be Microsoft developer with .NET (although I hadn't used Windows for 2 years before I was hired) and a few days ago they announced the opening of the .NET libraries source code. Great, isn't it? But then comes the license wich permits looking at the code, but not modifing it...