On Tuesday, September 24, 2013 5:33:36 AM UTC-4, Anguel wrote: > > > > >> The concept here is the people that buy them, know how Linux works and >> can get things going themselves and make what ever tweaks are >> required. Supporting all the different kernel versions and distributions, >> that is no feasible. >> > > Probably this is the nice business concept used by TI, CircuitCo, etc. > Sell chips and boards, make money, but let the open source community write > the software and support everything for free. Just make a product, label it > to be "for developers" and sell it without any support. >
There is a difference between "any support" and "not supported". "Not supported" means that it has been tested under a very specific software configuration and works for that configuration. If you check the Linux Source code, you will find a LOT of code written by Texas Instruments - so they are certainly providing SOME support. Interestingly, if you check the LCD drivers you will find that for small LCD screens, most of those drivers come from Nokia[or at the very least are based off Nokia drivers]. So no, it is not "the community" that is expected to support things "for free". How it works is that Nokia, a cell phone manufacturer, decides to use a Texas Instruments processor in a cell phone. They decide to use a specific model of LCD screen. They pay developers to create an LCD driver for a Texas Instruments supported linux kernel. If they find a bug in the TI LCD interface, they contact TI and TI works with them to fix it. Once they have the TI supported kernel working, they then try to use the same driver in the latest version of Android. If it doesn't work, their developers have to figure out what changes were made that broke something, and then they fix it. Considering that their going to order 100,000+ TI processors, they probably pay TI for support so their developers and TI's developers work on the driver. When that is all done, this driver which was written by Nokia with Texas Instruments help is then given to "the community" for free - under the terms of the standard GPL license, including: "THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, *YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION*." Please note that last line as it is the one you seem to object to, and yet it is the very reason companies are willing to give away applications they paid developers to write to the community - as they are not required to support them and you agreed to assume the cost. Android does NOT use the X11 window system, so the driver written by Nokia for their phone may not work properly for a Ubuntu desktop. As the reason Nokia paid developers to write it was for an android phone, I can't see any reason to expect them to make sure it works for Ubuntu "for free". Your receiving a huge amount of support from TI and CitcuitCo - however your "tone of voice" is demanding that they FIX the problem. They are not required to fix the problem, and you agreed to assume the cost of all correction. In all fairness, they should be billing you for the time spent responding to you as you agreed to "assume the cost". You have identified a problem. Programmers from "the community", "Texas Instruments", and "CircuitCo" have acknowledged the problem, done a good bit of deductive reasoning to determine where the problem lies and the general idea of how to fix it and given this information to you for free. There are four solutions specifically for you: A) Use the linux versions that are known to work for the device, move on with your life. B) Wait for someone to be willing to fix it "for free" C) Fix it "yourself" - note this does not mean you personally, this means either you fix it or hire someone to fix it. D) Give up in frustration and use a different product. If you wish, loudly proclaim that "everything just works out of the box". A few weeks down the road you will discover a different problem with the interaction of a completely different set of drivers that the vendor of that product doesn't use and does not support. When you do, if you choose to loudly proclaim your "solution" you can choose to acknowledge that your solution that "just worked" actually does not work so others who may be misled by your comments to also switch don't suffer the same issue. Or you can keep quiet about it to avoid looking foolish and thus cause economic harm to others. As a summary "not supported" means that the company is not required to pay engineers to fix problems you discover. As for making money, my understanding is that the Beagle Board line of products makes enough money to just about break even. Ie the little money made per board is used to pay for TI engineers time in answering questions and designing the next board. From a corporate standpoint, the point is not to "make money" selling BeagleBoards - but rather to provide thousands of smart people with a system that they can use create nifty tools. Out of the hundreds of nifty tools created, a few of them will have broad commercial potential. Some of those will get enough financial backing to have thousands of them made by a company and offered for sale. Maybe half of those commercial products will use the same processor as used on the BeagleBoard since all the code was written for it. The other half may well use a completely different chip from a different manufacturer which has a high enough price difference to justify rewriting programs. The processor won't be as powerful, but it will do the job. So TI's money comes from those few products that make it to being sold commercially and still use the same processor. This is certainly a successful business - there is a symbiotic relationship between "the community" getting free software from TI and TI getting improvements from "the community" for specific use cases. -- For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BeagleBoard" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beagleboard+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
