On Wed, 2006-12-27 at 14:14 +0100, Gabriel Ambuehl wrote: > Considering that we have an userland application that drives the chip, > shouldn't it be relatively straight forward to reverse engineer the protocol?
That takes time and with every new version of the phone the game starts all over. Closed source driver have always been a pain on Linux and still are. > But of course it would be better if Global Locate would simply provide it... Global Locate is certainly afraid of patent infringement. The market leader SiRF holds lots of patents around gps chipsets and regularly sues other chipmakers. And just by chance it happens that they sued Global Locate the other day. On the 18th of December to be exact. Most likely this battle will be settled by Global Locate paying license fees to SiRF. Global Locate should just make sure that the deal includes the communication/protocol with the chip. But the will only do so if the market demands for that. As FIC is planning to buy 100.000 of the chips per month they have enough buying power to communicate to GL that open specs are indeed a selling point. As the open source community supports FIC, so can do FIC in return. We just need to push them a little bit. Marcus _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
