Dear supporters of FreeCalypso, Given the vital role that proprietary source code leaks and the breaking of NDAs have played in making our project possible, I feel a need to pause and reflect on the great significance of today's momentous event: our dear sister Chelsea Manning, our modern-day Prometheus, is now a free woman!
Ancient Greeks understood quite well the importance of doing The Right Thing for the benefit of all Humankind and publicly releasing those secrets that should not be secret, even when doing this Right Thing requires breaking NDAs. The mythology of ancient Greece, the same mythology that gave names to the GSM baseband chips we hack on (Hercules, Ulysse, Samson, Calypso, Nausica, Iota, Syren and so forth), includes the tale of Prometheus, the great benefactor of Humankind. According to this story, the greedy and power-hungry gods tried to keep the secret of Fire proprietary, much like the big corporate players of today. Prometheus had access to Fire under an NDA like all other gods (back then there were many, many small-g gods, no fewer than the number of people today who have access to various proprietary sources under NDAs), but whereas all other small-g gods complacently went along with the edicts of Zeus and withheld the proprietary source for Fire from Humankind, Prometheus did the Right Thing: he willingly and deliberately broke his NDA and gave Fire to Humankind. Prometheus faced the wrath of Zeus for his valiant NDA-breaking act, and was subjected to hideously brutal punishment: he was chained to a rock, and Zeus sent one of his eagles to pluck out and eat his liver every day. Being an immortal god, Prometheus did not die from being eaten out alive and his liver would grow back every night, only to have the same torture repeated the next day, and onward for all of Eternity. According to the legend, Prometheus remained chained to that rock and had his liver eaten out every day for 30,000 years. It was supposed to be for Eternity, but another hero intervened. Heracles, better known as Hercules (that's where the 'HERC' in HERCROM400G2 came from), encountered Prometheus in his predicament while looking for a way to liberate some golden apples from the Garden of Hesperides. Heracles killed the eagle and freed Prometheus, and thus our original hero, the world's greatest NDA breaker of all times, was able to finally heal and move on with his presumably immortal life. Against this backdrop of ancient mythology we have the present-day story of Chelsea Manning. The secrets she disclosed to Wikileaks back in 2010 consisted of information which we all have the right to know, and she was brutally punished for her disclosures, much like Prometheus - and the gang of murderers known as USA whose war crimes she exposed even uses the eagle as its symbol. The same mass murderers whose atrocities are laid bare in Chelsea's disclosures sentenced her to 35 years in an all-male military prison where she languished for 7 years prior to today's release, with forced military male haircuts every two weeks - much like Prometheus' brutal punishment at the hands of Zeus. In light of this analogy with the ancient legend, the massive campaign for Chelsea's freedom mounted by the millions of her supporters around the world that culminated earlier today in her release can be compared to the valiant act of Heracles in the legend, who killed the eagle and freed Prometheus. So what is the take-away message from this story to the rest of us? I say it is as follows: anyone who is in a position of access to any kind of material that is wrongfully withheld from the public, be it government documents or proprietary source code and chip docs, has a DUTY to follow in the footsteps of Prometheus and Chelsea Manning, and release the secrets free to the world no matter what the threat of adverse consequences may be. To do otherwise is despicable cowardice. Being a wise and immortal god, Prometheus surely knew what punishment was in store for him, and yet he proceeded nonetheless with granting Fire to Humankind. Chelsea Manning said that she fully expected the worst to come as a result of her disclosures, but she felt compelled to share those documents nonetheless - she said that she wouldn't be able to live with a clear conscience otherwise. In light of the stories of Prometheus and Chelsea Manning, we can all clearly see how cowardly and despicable are the actions of those who hide behind NDAs and refuse to become leakers when they have far, far less at risk. Chelsea knew that she might never see the outside of prison again, yet she published the secret documents anyway. In contrast, former employees or contractors of some obscure cellphone or modem manufacturing company sitting on some source code or documents under an NDA did not have to fear even a single day in jail should they choose to leak, much less the 7 y that Chelsea endured as a woman in an all-male military prison. Therefore, if someone has access to some proprietary source code but chooses to cowardly uphold their NDAs instead of following Prometheus, I have nothing but shame and contempt for those persons. When it comes to our beloved Calypso, we already have everything we need: the TCS211 semi-src that was wrongfully withheld from Humanity for a full 2 y (the time interval from the first public demand for the disclosure of this semi-src until its liberation) by those shameworthy and contemptible persons I just spoke of was liberated in the fall of 2013, and the PCB layout that served as the basis for our FCDEV3B was liberated in the spring of 2015. Thus that particular wrong is now in the past - except that whenever someone asks why I started my own FreeCalypso project instead of joining OsmocomBB, the only answer I can give them is that I refuse to participate in a project that is rooted in cowardice and pandering to immoral copyright regimes. But there is plenty more proprietary software in the world, and I vehemently disagree with the Free Software Foundation and their ilk who believe that the right way to free the world from proprietary software is to waste innumerable human lifetimes reimplementing it all from scratch. Like the FSF et al, I believe that proprietary software should not exist - but I have a completely different opinion on how to get there. Instead of wasting lifetimes making a from-scratch reimplementation of every proprietary program in the world, we need to convince all of the world's wage slave employees and contractors with access to valuable proprietary sources to join Prometheus and Chelsea and leak those sources, i.e., all of the world's proprietary source code needs to be leaked, and every potential leaker must become an actual leaker. But leaking proprietary sources is only the first part, and the other equally important part is what happens to those sources after they are leaked. The documents Chelsea uploaded to Wikileaks have been read by millions of people, but sadly more technical projects based on leaked sources do not receive the attention they deserve - instead our project is surrounded by a wall of ostracism. This situation needs to change: a source leak does no one any good if the FLOSS projects resulting from that leak are shunned and ostracized, and such shunning of fruits-of-leaks projects is nothing but an insult to the courageous NDA-breakers who are the origin of the leaks. The world needs more free software of the second kind, free sw that is not a from-scratch reimplementation, but a direct derivative of a leaked proprietary source, made in valiant disregard of all copyrights and other nonsense. Right now our FreeCalypso is the only project of this kind that I am aware of, but rather than focus on our exceptional nature, we need to be shining a beacon of shame on the rest of the world - why are others not doing likewise in other areas of computing? Cellular telephony is not the only area of computing that is dominated by proprietary software without competitive free alternatives, there surely are plenty of others - why aren't there more people out there in every imaginable area of computing taking leaked proprietary sources and turning them into free software projects through a trivial act of disregarding copyrights? Take FPGAs for example: there are only two chip vendors in the world that make FPGAs of large enough logic capacity to be interesting (brand A and brand X), and compiling logic for both FPGA brands requires the use of their respective proprietary software. Given how big Altera and Xilinx are, surely there has to be *someone* out there who has a leaked copy of the source for their logic synthesis, P&R and configuration bit generation software - how can there not be? There may even be a small circle of people who are quietly sharing those leaked sources with each other in a hush-hush, whisper-whisper manner. But why in the hell are they doing this cowardly hush-hush, whisper- whisper routine? Why aren't such leaks loudly announced to the whole world, and why is there no one taking such leaks, hosting them on a prominently advertised site (like we do on our FTP site), importing the leaked source into a git or Hg repository and launching a FLOSS project based on that source? I similarly hear on occasion about someone here or there having a copy of the source for Solaris or VxWorks or some other potentially interesting proprietary sw, but it's always along the lines of "you can get a copy if you want, but you need to be quiet about it". I have consistently refused to participate in such hush-hush, whisper- whisper business - in my view a source leak is useless unless it is made truly public and its public availability is loudly announced from the mountaintops so that anyone who might potentially be interested will become aware of its existence and will be able to join or start a FLOSS project treating that leaked source as free software, like we are doing in FreeCalypso. All I can say in closing is that I hope that with our dear sister Chelsea now a free woman, more people will see that the Truth prevails in the end, and hopefully we will see not only more leaks, but more projects making direct practical use of those leaks. Hasta la Victoria, Siempre, Mychaela Nadezhda Falconia, a fellow trans woman _______________________________________________ Community mailing list Community@freecalypso.org https://www.freecalypso.org/mailman/listinfo/community