Mozilla cannot, and in some cases even ZTE cannot. The mods on XDA are almost all violating various copyrights.
The entire mobile SOC ecosystem is built on binary blobs and "propreitary" binary kernel modules. The blobs are there to feed and bootstrap the SOC's devices, the blob itself is the hardware's firmware. The "propreitary" modules are often derivatives of the kernel released without source. The last point is something I feel like ranting on. In the kernel we export various symbols/functions. Some of these are marked GPL_ONLY and to access them at compile time you must declare your module GPL. Now you might think that provided you do not use GPL_ONLY symbols then your module does not need to be under GPL. This is not the case. The only thing GPL_ONLY means is that if you use those then the kernel devs are 99% sure your module is a derivative work of the kernel and must be distributed under the GPL. Its still dead easy to make a derivative of the kernel without those symbols. The reason things continue is because the kernel community is betting that violators will come in line given time. Unless we own a copyright claim on the linux kernel we cannot even threaten to sue to the those modules under GPL. You must own the copyright on something to sue over it. Even if we did have grounds to sue there is no clear target. ZTE is not withholding the sources from us, if they have access to the source its been granted by their upstream under the condition ZTE will not pass it on. I bet in turn the SOC manufacturer does not even have all the rights to release the module under GPL, there is just that much copyright violation in the supply chain. Now back to those binary blobs. There is nothing we can do about them without the hardware manufacturer's permission. Remeber ages ago when you had to use b43-fwcutter to get broadcom chips to work under linux? The issue was broadcom was not allowing reditribution of the hardware's firmware. It is 100% legal to not allow free distrobution of firmware blobs. The saving grace is that blobs are often not tied to a kernel's version so we don't need to source to upgrade kernels. Sorry for the rant. The gist is Mozilla cannot distribute a working build because they are not allowed to. Daniel 2014-01-29 Daniel Roesler <[email protected]>: > What I don't understand: > > Mozilla has so much to lose from a bad ZTE Open experience. It is > their flagship device! It's the _only_ native Firefox OS device you > can buy now, and it's extremely cheap so developers can easily try > Firefox OS out. > > I'd guess that there's an order of magnitude more app developers > trying Firefox OS on the ZTE Open than all other devices combined. If > they get frustrated, you have basically killed your entire app > developer community. That's a huge price to pay. Mozilla has way more > to lose than ZTE does. So why isn't Mozilla stepping up to make up for > ZTE's lack of support? > > Finally, not having control over the kernel/firmware never stopped > anyone from figuring out how to make it work. Android modders have > been dealing with that crap for years, and they still keep cranking > out upgrades just fine. So I don't think that's a valid excuse when > your project's future is on the line. > > > On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 11:33 AM, pazos <[email protected]> wrote: >> @Daniel: Mozilla has no control over the bootloader, the kernel, the radio >> firmware, because its not part of B2G. IMO Its not mozilla's fault but >> provider fault. ZTE does not complain with any opensource licenses at all. >> >> I'm currently mergin some geeksphone init scripts to device-inari tree in >> order to fully build boot.img from B2G sources. (extracting the kernel from >> the device is pretty trivial). I already made a pull request to add >> proximity sensor support and I'm waiting for merge. >> >> But none of those things will keep us to have some problems between >> versions, because they are *NOT COMPATIBLE AT ALL* >> >> If you want to provide custom builds to people over the net you should >> notify the version which was used to pick the blobs. I would suggest to >> update all the phones to new 1.1.0B02 firmware and then rebuild the whole >> B2G (first remove the backup-inari folder to be sure that all the blobs are >> picked from your phone). >> >> _______________________________________________ >> dev-b2g mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g > _______________________________________________ > dev-b2g mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g _______________________________________________ dev-b2g mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
