> >> ²>> the main entrance but inside from about 11:45 to 12:00 holding in > >>>> front of > >>>> me a sign with the OpenPhoenux logo. > >>> > >>> I'll be there, and I guess Paul will read this as well. I'll wear my > >>> phone around my neck for identification. > >> > >> Sure, count me in as well! > > > > I waited for about half an hour at the indicated location, with Christ > > who had to leave at some point. Eventually, I gave up and grabbed lunch > > on my own. > > > > Thankfully, we were able to chat a bit after my talk! > > sorry that I could not visit FOSDEM this year and did miss your talk. > But I am curious how it was. > > And how the FOSDEM generally was. Anything interesting to share > with our community?
As usual, FOSDEM was a nice event to be a part of! However, it is a bit sad that the people working on creating embedded devices that truly push free software to the next level were under-represented this year. In particular, I'm thinking about the OpenPhoenux community (Goldelico with the GTA04, Neo900) as well as the DragonBox Pyra, Novena and all the board makers that use Allwinner, i.MX, OMAP chips. Thus, I felt that the discussions around the embedded devroom were not very freedom-oriented. Overall, I had a feeling that talking about freedom and the core values of why we're doing all this is going away, which is sad because it didn't feel the same last year. This is only true in part, because I had very interesting discussions with graphics people who truly believe this is the right way to go, so that was refreshing. We also discussed a bit how to get more support from companies and there is a lot to say there because obviously, not every company out there acts like TI by providing extensive documentation and direct support form their engineers to the community. Tsvetan from Olimex talked about his experience with Allwinner during the round table fill-in session we had during John Sullivan's slot (his talk had been cancelled). The point was that most of those companies (especially the Asian ones) don't care about free software (and often neglect most of the legal aspects of it). They are interested in making money before anything and producing upstream quality code costs them a lot of money and doesn't apparently bring any significant advantage. Apparently, only very big companies like Intel, Samsung and others can afford to have people dedicated to writing quality free software support for their hardware. Even writing documentation to give free software developers has an enormous cost. Now there are different ways to react to that (which is exactly what the linux-sunxi community faced). I do agree with Luc Verhaegen's approach of complaining as loudly as possible when the chip maker does not release the source code it has to release (e.g. kernel bits) under the GPL terms. Such violations do not require any more code to be written, just will for the company to release them, so I do agree that pressuring them to release those bits is the only reasonable thing to do. This is an attack towards our community and there is no reason to be kind of quiet about it. Now when it comes to getting the company to take part in the community, there are different approaches that could make it work and I'm not sure which is best. Apparently in the graphics area, customers pressuring the PR department combined with the fact that competitors are doing it too can give some results (at least, it's starting to work with nVidia). For instance, Imagination Technologies (PowerVR maker) is now selling their MIPS CI-20 single board computer that has a PowerVR series 5 chip which requires proprietary software for graphics acceleration and 3D. Since Img Tech is selling that board directly, there is a direct customer relation with us so we can pressure their public relationships department to ask for change (the guy's name is Alexandru Voica). So please, if you feel like getting one of those CI-20 boards (they're actually not so bad for software freedom, see: https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers) and complain to Img Tech afterwards for the lack of free graphics support, please do (they're actually pretty cheap too)! -- Paul Kocialkowski, Replicant developer Replicant is a fully free Android distribution running on several devices, a free software mobile operating system putting the emphasis on freedom and privacy/security. Website: http://www.replicant.us/ Blog: http://blog.replicant.us/ Wiki/tracker/forums: http://redmine.replicant.us/
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