MobiLiberty.com to be closed.
OfflineInterestingly I am posting this on Q&S forum of Libervis.com. This may be a symbolical confirmation that Libervis.com would increasingly be a think-tank core towards which the rest of this network gravitates. Our discussions may be deep and philosophical, but that's where some practical ideas are born and then presented to the greater public (those who aren't so attracted to all the philosophical, political etc. talk) as new LN projects.
One of such projects was supposed to be on MobiLiberty.com which is now just dormant. I admit it as a failure. It is unfortunate, considering how much time we spent just trying to come up with a name, discussions we had about what could we do with it, involving the whole concept of submitting content by blogging.. but it never really got off the ground. I didn't have enough motivation and that OpenMoko project was and continues to be severely late with what I expect to be a "mass market" model of the completely open phone - the time just seems to have not come.
2008 may very well be the year of the "Linux Phone", but not perhaps of a completely open phone like Neo1973 and FreeRunner, which I hear is also not an entirely mass-market phone, but just a better preview, a release candidate so to speak. Yet MobiLiberty.com was supposed to attract the ordinary people, not just geeks and developers, to such phones...
So.. there are two options now:
1.) Sell the domain, content database and site design (basically everything except the current hosting). From estimates I've seen it would be worth basically $120 USD, or so. Issue to resolve is regarding the content submitted by others and its copyrights, namely Taco Buitenhuis from around here.. I believe he's the only one. 
2.) Keep the domain and try to do something moderately useful with it, from redirecting it to somewhere else (Nuxified.org perhaps) to just creating a useful links page for free phones.. a sort of a mini-directory. This option may make sense in hope that at some point it could grow into something much more significant. It comes at a cost of roughly $10 a year for the domain name, and a barely noticeable server space/processing power. I already renewed it for 2008.
3.) Any suggestions?
Thank you.
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We could just replace it by a simple (the linuxpreloaded way) page with a list of freedomware phones and other portable devices running freedomware. Only things on which replacing the OS is realistically possible should be included.
The articles we wrote for it can be moved to nuxified, and a link to the nuxified article category should be placed on mobiliberty.
Stick (google?) ads to the thing, and I think given some time it should bring in more than $120.
Then again, maintaining it takes time, so selling still seems like a good option.
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I like your idea. To be honest I have quite a bit of doubt that I could sell, or at least sell for more than $100, so not sure if it's really that worthwhile.
This way I think turning it into a nice static site as you describe could even get it dugg, for a nice start, and then keep bringing a little bit of traffic from search engines and social networks... Maybe it could also feed latest news from some relevant sites in a block just to keep it auto-updated while the actual page isn't updated in certain periods.
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A link exchange with linuxpreloaded would also be a good idea...
I think the original site would have worked better if we had actually had the money to buy all those nice gadgets and review them
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Indeed, we could try the link exchange, as "Linux preloaded on mobile phones".
And yeah, that would've helped, but primary interest was in Neo, which wasn't even ready at the time mobiliberty opened, and even today the mainstream version isn't ready, and it is the complete mainstream kind of stuff that we wanted to target.. But well.. if we keep the domain and repurpose it into a small static site, all the potential is still there in case there is a fully open mobile boom at some point in the future and we actually have the money to test.
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It's ahead of it's time ok, but a snappy name embodying the concept, and mobile freedomware trends mean it's an asset that will likely increase in value and utility, so if it were me I'd keep it too and you're ideas seem fine. When it's ready for prime time, for Digg or Reddit you could post a link to a controversial article like "5 Reasons to change your Mobile" or what-not.
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