Bob Ham <r...@settrans.net> wrote: > Please allow me to address a question to the community as a whole: if > you can produce a free phone then why aren't you? Do it! What are you > *waiting* for?
Well, as you've asked the community as a whole, without restrictive language to exclude any particular factions of the community (e.g., the illegal faction, which I'm heading), I'll take the liberty of posting my answer. I am in fact working on building a new phone - as in new physical hw. However, the type of phone I'm seeking to build is quite different from what Canonical tried to fund, and from what most of this community seems to be interested in. I personally will never be happy with a smartphone *of any kind* as my everyday phone - instead the kind of phone I want is the kind we all had in the 1990s - a plain or "dumb" or feature phone. And that is the type of phone I'm working on building - a plain old-fashioned "candybar" phone without any smarts, and no application processor to run Linux or any other smartphone OS - only the traditional ARM7 baseband processor running traditional RTOS- based GSM phone firmware. But the plain/dumb/feature phone which I'm working on building will have one key difference from the ones you can buy for $20 on ebay: it will be 100% free as in freedom, in terms of both hardware and firmware. In the case of hardware it means publishing full, *unredacted* schematics and PCB EDA files, and choosing only those components for which full documentation is available. As for the firmware, yes, it will be an RTOS phone, no Linux or the like, no application processor, but the full C source for that RTOS-based firmware can still be published. And because such a totally free phone can never, ever, ever be produced legally, I am doing it as an explicitly-illegal project, under the aegis of the international community of outlaws, criminals and lawbreakers - i.e., my brothers and sisters. Of course a project of this magnitude won't happen overnight. But I handle it the same way I've handled all other projects which appear totally insurmountable at first: I divide the problem into bite-sized chunks, and work on the initial stages without worrying too much about what difficulties may lie in the later stages - I'll deal with those when the time comes. The FreeCalypso phone project has the following rough roadmap: 1. Build the FreeCalypso software/firmware first. In May-June of this year I have found some new and exciting TI firmware source leaks (archived on my mini-Wikileaks at ftp.ifctf.org) which will hopefully make it unnecessary for me to sacrifice my life in a gunfire exchange with the German or Russian police after kidnapping a moko-hoarder: these new leaks appear to be much closer to TI's "mainline" than the famous PurpleLabs TSM30 source, and I'm quite confident that by using these new leaks I can recreate something very close to what Om-Inc and its former employees/contractors have wrongfully withheld from Humanity - but in full source form. (The LoCosto leak in particular, which I'm backporting from LoCosto to Calypso, has the GSM stack in full source form, unlike what Om-Inc purportedly got, and it appears to be from the same time frame as Om's version - much newer than the TSM30 one.) I am working on this sw/fw part right now, using the Pirelli DP-L10 feature phone and the GTA02 GSM modem as my two bring-up/test platforms. In fact, the Pirelli phone fits me almost perfectly in terms of hardware features, and I have thought long and hard about just settling on it as my hw platform. But there are a few problems with this existing platform which have ultimately swayed me to my current plan of biting the bullet and building my own phone hw instead: a) No schematics could be found for this phone. (The OsmocomBB folks are also hacking on Compal/Motorola phones for which there are full schematics, but their hardware features are insufficient for me: I would really miss the tri-band support, the loudspeaker and the USB charging capability.) Schematics can be reconstructed by PCB reverse engineering given enough determination, but it would be hard to justify the effort given the other two problems: b) This particular phone has a bunch of extra chips beyond the essential Calypso chipset, and for most of these extra chips no docs can be found. While they support functionality which I can easily live without (camera and WiFi), their presence would tremendously complicate any attempt to reconstruct the full schematics, and may throw up issues when the time comes to implement thorough power management: how do we ensure that these undocumented and unsupported chips are fully powered down? c) The biggest show-stopper of all: the supply of these phones on the surplus market appears to have been exhausted. I've managed to grab a few before they disappeared, so I've got enough for my sw/fw development and testing, but not enough to give out to members of my own coven (for use as everyday phones), let alone for the general public interested in a totally free phone, albeit by means of illegal firmware. Hence I have made the plan that after I'm done with the FreeCalypso sw/fw part (i.e., once I'm able to make and receive calls with my DP-L10 and my GTA02 running my freecalypso-sw), I will tackle the task of building my own hardware: * The core chipset will be Calypso, exactly the same version as in the GTA02 and Pirelli phones - the chips are still readily available in decent quantities from several Chinese sellers. * The rest of the hardware will be modeled after Pirelli DP-L10 - see OsmocomBB's description of that phone. I've already found the same flash+pSRAM chip used by Pirelli, so there is plenty of room to grow the firmware into a high-end feature phone, and I'll use a 128x128 CSTN LCD just like Pirelli's - either exactly the same LCM or a functional equivalent. I'll keep the super-neat USB arrangement used by Pirelli (using either the same CP2102 or maybe an FTDI chip), and I'm shooting for a quad-band RF front-end like in TI's Leonardo+ reference design. * Those components of Pirelli's design for which We the People lack documentation will be dropped - that means the camera and WiFi. The camera stands a good chance of being re-added in a later version, but not the WiFi - I have no use for the latter, the software complexity required to make use of it in a pure RTOS environment would be enormous, hence I'm not going to design hardware which I'll never use and for which I'll never justify expending the time to develop the necessary sw. The first version of my non-smart Calypso GSM phone design will be built as a bare board without caring too much about the form factor - just roughly the size of a typical candybar phone. And most important of all, all hw design source files for that board will be free to the world (in fact, the design will be done in a public source repository from the beginning, and using free EDA tools) - hence even if I never take the project any further, others will be free to take the PCB design source and tweak to whatever form factor or circuit changes they like. Of course there will be no requirement of running my (illegal) FreeCalypso firmware on this GSM board - if someone would rather run the purportedly-legal OsmocomBB code instead, there is no reason why that wouldn't work. But don't delude yourself into thinking that you can make a totally free GSM phone actually legal simply by abstaining from reusing TI's working GSM stack code and rewriting it all from scratch yourself a la OsmocomBB - it will *still* be an illegal phone, simply because it's an unlicensed radio transmitter operating in the highly regulated GSM frequency bands. No regulator will *ever* grant legal approval to a totally free cellphone which is specifically designed to empower every user to recompile the modem firmware from source and to tinker with it as s/he pleases. Hence any such totally free phone will always have to be explicitly-illegal, regardless of whether one reuses existing firmware source code or not - and I choose to reuse. But there is one thing which the community needs to grasp: just because something is illegal does NOT automatically mean that it's bad, or that it's impractical, or that it shouldn't be done. We the People outnumber the cops by 1000 to 1. The most effective way to get rid of repressive laws is to break them universally. If every single person is a lawbreaker, whom are they going to go after? The narcs were powerless to stop the People from drinking booze during the Prohibition, they are powerless to stop us from using drugs now, and we need to show them that they are just as powerless to stop us from using illegal GSM phones, operating without approval and reusing good working source code without regard for copyrights, trade secrets etc. Anyway, the point of my post was and is that someone *is* in fact working on building a new totally free phone, albeit illegal, and not a smartphone but of the plain/dumb/feature kind. Viva la Revolucion, SF _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community