About the OpenEZX project

Who's behind OpenEZX?

OpenEZX is currently run by Harald Welte. The project started as a one-man effort, but has already attained the interest of a steadily growing community of Free Software enthusiasts.

Why OpenEZX?

Motorola has developed these incredibly cool Linux-based mobile phones (which they internally seem to be calling EZX Platform). This is really great, since the Motorola EZX phones are the first series of Linux based phones that are available on a large scale.

However, Motorola have "locked down" the phone. They don't want their users to make use of Linux, but rather only use the J2ME API's for their own applications. They don't publish any SDK for development of native Linux applications :(

But who wants to develop bloated Java code, if the phone is a full-fledged Linux device?

Also, like many vendors, Motorola (and their upstream partner MontaVista) have enhanced the Linux kernel significantly with lots of hardware support and other bits and features. One user of the motorolafans.com community has managed to obtain the kernel source code, which is good. However, none of those features (written against kernel 2.4.20) have ever been submitted mainline, or even only to the ARM Linux project :(

Goals of OpenEZX

The main goals are:

Collect and publish information related to the Motorola EZX Phone hard- and software.
Port all drivers from the Motorola 2.4.20 tree into a recent 2.6.x kernel. Once they're working fine, submit all of them to the mainline tree.
Provide a source tree that allows for running a 100% Free Software firmware. Initially this will "just" be a 100% free Linux Kernel, userspace may follow later on.

Webmaster

Web site design by Harald Welte. The current Webmaster is Stefan Schmidt.

Project history

The project started in October 2005, when Harald was looking very closely at his recently-acquired A780 and E680 phones.

Apart from that, please see the news section of this homepage for further noteworthy events.

Thanks

The OpenEZX project thanks the following companies, organizations and individuals who contributed to the project:

noris network AG for sponsoring IP traffic and hosting to this website
Maintech for hosting the wiki.
motorolafans.com for their great community and helpful Motorola hackers. Without their support, OpenEZX would not have been established.
Free Software Foundation for creating the GNU General Public License and starting the free software movement.
David McKelvie for creating our logo.
Wolfgang Spraul for donating one A1200 and one E680i to the project.
Simon Neininger for donating a A780 to the project.
Giant Shoulder Incorporated for donating 100 USD to Stefan Schmidt for his work on the project.
Giant Shoulder Incorporated for a USB JTAGKey-tiny to Stefan Schmidt for his work on the project.
Peter Malte Mack for donating an A910 to the project.
Frédéri Eddi for donating two A910 to the project.