Hi Josh, And thank you for writing the draft letter. I will comment on its content a little later, as right now I am very tired - exhausted from dealing with a certain transphobic bigot on the Replicant mailing list who could not grasp the simple concepts that I am now a she and not a he, and that Mychaela Falconia is my new real name, not some kind of pseudonym concocted for the purpose of hiding from copyright enforcers.
Now let me introduce Josh: he also comes from the Replicant mailing list, but unlike the other guy he seems to have no problem with me being a woman. :) Josh seems to be quite interested in what FreeCalypso has to offer technically and practically, but he is deathly afraid of criminal prosecution for copyright infringement, hence he has been asking me to ask TI (on behalf of the FreeCalypso project) for permission to use their code under a free software license. Under different circumstances I would not have engaged in any endeavor that gives an appearance of legitimacy to the despicable religion of copyright and license worship, but those on this list (FreeCalypso community) already know that I have another reason why I would like to try my luck in reasoning with TI: we don't have a source for the proper TCS211 version of L1, only other not-quite-fitting versions, and while I am certain that we can reconstruct the necessary bits by reverse eng if we can't find that missing original source, the effort may be rather monstrous, hence I am trying to leave no stone unturned looking for that original source piece before we give up on it and engage in the brutally painful RE effort. Leaving no stone unturned includes asking TI, and if I'm going to ask them for help with source pieces, naturally the question of license terms will come up: thus I decided to combine my and Josh's otherwise separate quests into one, and get the rest of our community behind it as well. I have my own thoughts on what we should say to TI, but like I said, I'll write about that later - too tired right now. I did, however, do a little homework toward finding *whom* to contact at TI (which is really the most challenging part): I confirmed today that TI's office in San Diego (which happens to be very close to my neck of the woods) is still open and operating. This tidbit is significant in that it is the only office of TI USA I know of that was involved in the now- defunct baseband chipset business; the rest was done in Europe, primarily in the Nice, France office which appears to have been fully shut down and dissolved. One of the old TI presentations we found says that the San Diego office did 3G work, and my own experience confirms: a coworker of mine at my current day job used to work there, and guess what she worked on - that's right, 3G. But she and the others in that group still had to interoperate a bit with the older 2G stuff our FreeCalypso project is concerned with - they were using some other company's 3G chip and making it work together with TI's LoCosto for GSM/2G. My coworker told me that her whole group was laid off when TI got out of the baseband chipset business, but as I just confirmed today, the office itself is still there. I have no idea what they are working on in there these days - no way to tell, could be anything. My next step will be asking my coworker (the next time I catch her, may take a few days) if she perchance remembers the name of the manager she used to work for at TI San Diego, or anyone else sufficiently high in there to have a chance of still being with TI. If we can find someone at TI who remembers that this stuff once existed, we would have a much higher chance of getting somewhere than if our petition is received by someone who has no slightest idea what we are talking about, and wouldn't be able to look it up as all traces of TI's former involvement in this business have been erased. M~ _______________________________________________ Community mailing list [email protected] https://www.freecalypso.org/mailman/listinfo/community
