Drastically reduced, i suspect. Since the specs are so poor now compared to modern hardware, and the price is high, only people who value privacy above all else in a phone will be interested. Most of the people who want to tinker with hardware will have moved to Pis. The fact that they talk about trying to get another round of funding before shipping the devices suggests detachment from reality has set in.
still no answer or news from metacollin. I'm short of better ideas than just waiting for him to return, as finding a new layouter isn't really an option for feasibility, timing and financial reasons. I really hope he is well and just needed a recovery time which he was smarter than me and actually took it.
So how can we help?
Joerg, GDC, Neo900 team, TMO, I do not fault you and the Neo900 team when I make statements of resignation to our fate. I would contribute to the Neo900 and did buy a GTA02 because I was part of that bleeding edge who wanted truly free hardware, I had more free cash then. There seems to simply not be enough of us who care out there to make a real difference. If we want gnu Linux or another FOSS and radically free hardware device we need to sell more people on the concept before we can get our stuff, or we need to find a very wealthy patron who will decide for us what we will get with a subsidy. As long as we see real nerds falling into the arms of the walled garden and buying hardware there we wont get the devices that we and probably they truly want.
That is one way of seeing it. Another way is that I am a customer buying a product. And I expect the team building the product to approach it as a business. Not as an ideological mission. Running a business includes setting yourself achievable goals and sticking to them. A good example is Chen and his Moto keyboard. He set himself an achievable goal, said exactly what he would deliver and resisted interference. And there you go - a result! I believed and still believe that "an N900 with a faster CPU and more RAM", as per the poll question at the top of this page, was an achievable goal. It was all the "better infrared", "turn-off-able modem" and "rewrite the entire OS" mission creep that eventually killed the project. Sure, by all means, build that as the next project. You cannot jump a mountain in one big leap. You climb it step by step.
While I agree with you on the point of businesses and achievable goals in general, I do not agree with you on the Neo900-specific "mission creep". I don't care about the "better infrared" or the "rewrite the entire OS", but to me the "turn-off-able modem", respectively the underlying attitude of "privacy above all else", has always been "the product". I would have even signed up for the Neo900 if the replacement board hadn't promised any perfomance increase at all, as long as it would have been a phone being able to run Debian. What I would not have signed up for is a 10x faster device with the same design defect like the N900 of having a "semi-open" OS that would grind to a slow death because proprietary bits keep it from having security issues fixed. If I wanted that, then I would have already bought half a dozen android phones.
As it stands, the Neo900 currently is sort of like a "technological artifact" to me. I don't actually count on ever receiving one anymore. I'm mainly sticking to it now, because the money I invested in it doesn't hurt me, and in the unlikely case that one day it will be shipped I will have something that might not actually be useful, but it will be a rare example of the embodyment of an idea I support. I think of it as some piece of art. You don't buy a Picasso because it's useful.
the uBlog is broken and actually always been, sorry I probably simply should nuke it from the site How comes despite we offer all the sourcecode of the website on git (http://neo900.org/git/www/log/) and told several times we are no web developers unlike most "programmers" out there claim to be, we rarely ever seen a single community contribution? A BIG THANK YOU to arch_tk and sn0wmonster who did and do help and contribute, as well as to the few others that did and I missed to mention them here.
Neo900 did take up the challenge. We evaluated that concept and found we can't include a pager receiver since there are simply too many different standards in different areas of this globe. We however have hackerbus that totally allows plugging in such receiver as a user hw extension. We informed RMS about that option since he originally suggested that concept to us. Alas he doesn't like the fact that our modem has a documented method to update the firmware since that defeats the RYF approach of pretending ignorance of any software/firmware in peripherals. Note that this is not at all a technical objection but merely an arbitrary semantic one - if we could get an identical modem with documentation that simply doesn't list the command for firmware update, we would comply with FSF's RYF and RMS' desires in that regard.