On 26/05/13 08:06, Bruce Perens wrote: > The unsavory individual who brought us the Raspberry Pi and who > convinced 100,000 people who did not look very hard to buy them works > for the company that produces its CPU integrated circuit. He is > essentially the only person who can write drivers for it, since he > selected a chip whose data sheets are under NDA. This is why there are > so many problems, like the USB driver being unable to switch from one > speed to another, thus making a number of USB devices incompatible while > used with the Raspberry Pi. > > People ask why I think the Open Hardware community is dominated by > morons. It's because they dive joyously into such things.
Yeah, the Raspberry Pi is a good start, but a long way from what is actually needed. I get the feeling that some of these big players in the SoC world just don't "get" open source. That said, I'll admit I'm a new player to the field, and quite possibly naïve... it's just the impression I get having tried to work with TI, Broadcom and Freescale chippery. > Get a chip from a company that respects you. It's on the beaglebone black. Hmmm, my experience with TI hasn't exactly been great. They all play silly proprietary games. One time that sticks in my mind was when I was working with Jacques Electronics on their video intercom... a device built around the Freescale i.MX27. They chose the TI TMS320AIC3204 audio codec because of its feature set, and the promise of a ALSA driver. After explaining to TI's rep that we intended to use the driver on a Freescale SoC, and signing an NDA, they give us a driver emblasened with headers stating that this code may only be run on a TI OMAP processor. I wound up spending the next few weeks hacking the berjesus out of the TLV320AIC3x ALSA SoC driver¹ to give them something that would run the chip. I also recall one of the TI management people mentioning that they were "not in the business of helping their competitors"... this is despite supporting and benefiting from a driver framework (ALSA SoC; predominately maintained by Wolfson Micro) which has been largely contributed to by competitors. -- Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter, VK4MSL) I haven't lost my mind... ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere. 1. http://www.longlandclan.yi.org/~stuartl/asoc/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try New Relic Now & We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, & servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_may _______________________________________________ Freetel-codec2 mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freetel-codec2
