[ Let's use a meaningful subject. ] Christoph Pulster wrote: > The format "Pad" is no new idea. The industrial product range use it > since many years.
This is, by the way, one sector likely to be able to limit the complexity of tasks, as I described in my previous post. In fact, the possibilities and mechanical complexity of a laptop would just get in the way in many cases. > I consider the idea, that the future of open source hardware could be > this: taking high-quality hardware from big players like Apple, which > are sexy and free of bugs. But jailbreaking/reflashing the bootloader, > installing a free OS. That's the anti-vendor port approach. FSO had high hopes for it. A while back, Mickey sounded disappointed with the feasibility of this. But maybe things have gotten better since ? I did my share of reverse engineering as well. It's not so bad if you have plenty of time, the device isn't overly complex, and most of the functionality is already openly documented. E.g., for the Psion S5, we had documentation for the SoC, we left all the hardware bringup to the native operating system, and we got leaked information for their custom ASIC. We figured out almost everything we needed to know. Storage (CF) was a bit shaky but still usable. Phones are quite a bit more complex. Also, there are areas where you're currently unlikely to get proper documentation, such as the modem. So you need to plan around them, e..g, by substituting a highly integrated solution with a SoC without modem plus a "black box" modem. There is little reason for a manufacturer of Closed phones to make such a choice. So you won't find any mass-market devices that do this for you. There are other components where you can choose between Open and Closed. If Open is not a design objective and you're used to sign lots of NDAs (or you have blanket NDAs with various chip makers already), the decision may be fairly arbitrary. Thus each chip lowers the probability that the overall design will be Open-friendly. That's why I think it's indispensable to be able to choose which chips you put into your design, and to negotiate with chip makers before selecting components. Once you've committed yourself, it's nearly impossible to change the conditions. (In Openmoko alone, we have two examples: GTA01's GPS and GTA02's WLAN. In a university project I did some years ago, there was a competing project from another university. We had insisted on permission to GPL our driver, while our competitors accepted an NDA that didn't let them. Ironically, even after we released our driver they never managed to get that NDA changed.) - Werner _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
