Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller <h...@goldelico.com> wrote: > Not everybody is weighting the factor of "freeable down to the modem" equally > when calculating the relative position of two devices to decide between > "upgrade" and "downgrade". You have a different weighting than me.
If freedom is not important to you, then you might as well use an iPhone or the latest Android from Samsung. As Jim Marrs has said very eloquently in the preface to one of his books, being free is like being pregnant - either you are, or you aren't. > I don't know, but isn't *that* something you should fight against > instead of modifying > leaked firmware for a system that never has been locked? "Modifying leaked firmware" is not an accurate description of what I am doing. As you should know full well, I am designing and building my own Free Plain Phone, and I have chosen to use the same Calypso chipset as used in the GTA02. I chose this chipset because it already exists, because it is known to work exceptionally well, at least in "dumbphone" applications (I've been using one of my Pirelli phones as my everyday cellphone since last spring, and I have nothing but praise for it in terms of battery life, GSM signal strength and call quality), because all hardware documentation and firmware sources for this chipset have already been freed, and because I have already amassed a great deal of experience working with this chipset. Providing hacking support for Openmoko-made modems is simply a side- product of my FreeCalypso work: I have chosen to bring my firmware up on known-working hardware first, so that when I build my own hw and get to debug it, I will have the benefit of known-working firmware. Put another way, the free phone community (combination of FreeCalypso and OsmocomBB projects) has already made great progress with the Calypso chipset. Switching to another vendor's chipset on a whim would be an enormous setback for the project and for the community, and it is not fair for you to ask that of us - here I am referring to the "you should be working on this instead of that" argument in your comment. > So your claim of "GTA02 is 100% freeable and GTA04 is not" is only based on > your disinterest to work on solutions? I am working on solutions, but the problem I have chosen to solve is different from yours. Some people, such as me, simply want a good working cellphone, a device for making and receiving phone calls on the go - and we want this cellphone to be free as in 100% owned and controlled by the user. If the objective is to have a plain phone, rather than a mobile computer, a device consisting of just one baseband processor, without an extra application processor, is a technically superior solution for the problem at hand: greater battery life, less unnecessary complexity, fewer points of failure. And the existence of the Calypso chipset makes it possible for such a simple and efficient "dumbphone" to also be 100% free by virtue of the user owning and controlling the complete firmware. Then there are those people who do want their pocket-resident device to be a computer complete with an OS like GNU/Linux, rather than just a phone - but some of those people would also want that device to be 100% free including the telephony processor - and not just "half-free" aka "half-pregnant". For this class of users, the best currently extant device is the GTA02, made by Openmoko - not your GTA04, and not my dumbphone either. Yes, there is the problem of these devices no longer being made - but instead of solving this problem by building a new device that would be as near-identical to the GTA02 as possible, including the Calypso (just like how I seek to copy the Pirelli DP-L10 as closely to verbatim as possible), you are making it worse by *actively destroying* the remaining stock of Openmoko phones! Hence we will likely always be fighting on opposite sides. VLR, SF _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
