Tony -
... and what's the quantities you want to buy. I think if we could
buy their whole company, the openness should not be an issue anyway.
But before that happens, ...
FANTASTIC!
Tony, your explanation settles this topic once and for all...
Way to go!
Wolfgang
On Feb 16, 2008, at 12:42 PM, Neng-Yu Tu (Tony Tu) wrote:
joerg ??:
Am Fr 15. Februar 2008 schrieb Brandon Kruse:
In that case it is not an open phone or platform.
It's a philosophical question, where "open" has it's limits. E.g.
you probably consider a plain vanilla x86 GNU/linux desktop system
to be pretty much "true open". However i guess you have no idea at
all of the firmware that's managing your harddisk in this system.
That's for a simple reason: IDE interface is age old (and so all
HD's (SATA, SCSII) inherited this way we are looking at these
devices), it is "just working", and it's well documented. Virtually
nobody cares about the firmware behind this interface, mainly
because it doesn't have a chance to stop you from doing anything
you like on the _main_system_. I'm almost certain there's a hacker
somewhere out there, who likes to mod his HD so the head motors
will produce funny sounds, and another one thinks he can tune
transfer rates even another 10k/s. However i never seen FOSS HD
firmware.
When things down to that low level, it's not only firmware issue. It
also about chip selection for specific design. For example, every HD
has some write cache mechanism in firmware, but some of read/wirte
acceleron also chipset related, some chip vender's read/write cache
command for SDRAM just faster and stable than others. And you will
need these details specification to do the hardware ans firmware
design.
Chip selection also is the balance of performance/usability/price/
marketing, especially for mass production products like hard disk,
user won't even notice the changes on chips and cause of change chips.
And transfer rate is a myth: means write into cache/or write on the
disk and then verified it write correct. It has some many detais for
a single bit from keyboard to your hard disk. If anyone could get
10% transfer faster algorithm for any hard disk, no vendor would
refuse it :)
It is well worth the investigation to go fully open somehow IMO.
Sure. But it's a silly idea to try and force the subsystem
manufacturers by refusing to support their closed source firmware
updates. When Seagate comes with a DOS-only firmware updater to add
some cool new features to their drives, OM says "No, it's not
FOSS!". Seagate (or here, the chip fabs) don't care. But OM
deprives NEO owners of any means to have a new firmware for these
subsystems. If a user doesn't like to have closed source on his
device, she is free delete or not install it. But OM will not
achieve anything by refusing to provide closed source drivers. I
think all they get is a huge number of returns, or less sales (at
least for me). And OM(!) isn't willing or able to provide circuit
diagrams, so any open drivers are extremely hard to develop. In my
opinion they can't do both, refuse to support closed source updates
*and* keep the hw specs closed. Not if they care about their
customers.
Not to mention, NEO will not be "open" at all as long as the
hardware is a 'big mystery'. A laugh to start with closed firmware
topic.
Most function on GTA was exist in module format, and do a lot
negotiation with vendor to open their document or firmware update
utility. It is not OM say: We want this open. Then the vendor say:
no problem, just open it. Usually comes with the answer that: Well,
we need to ask our legal department first, and what's the quantities
you want to buy. I think if we could buy their whole company, the
openness should not be an issue anyway. But before that happens, we
have to through long negotiation for each of the components for
better hardware openness.
I think GTA is not as complex as ps3 or close hardware as Aphone,
you could almost ask any question in the kernel development mailing
list for the details for hardware related except ask for full
schematics directly :)
I could not speak for OM, but open anything we did is the target,
also the times we spent to talk with vendors, and we will keep
persuade hardware vendor/industries anyway :)
But I guess we could be like olpc and have a MOSTLY open platform
(wifi chip is not, as you could have guessed)
I'd like it more to see OM pushing manufacturers to provide a
guaranteed API, which is specified by community, and not to care
about _how_ the mfactrs achieve to fulfill this contract. Than to
nag manufacturers to open the sources of firmware, "because we can
do better, and do not want to use what we paid for".
Maybe you imply a open standard for each hardware module access
here :)
Tony Tu
_______________________________________________
OpenMoko community mailing list
community@lists.openmoko.org
http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
_______________________________________________
OpenMoko community mailing list
community@lists.openmoko.org
http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
