Hello, >________________________________________ >From: Dave Neary [[email protected]] On Behalf Of ext Dave Neary >[[email protected]] > >My question (based on the web page, and indeed your answer here) is what >functionality has been sacrificed in the name of freedom - that is, if >someone wanted to run an N900 without the binary blobs, what would not >work? I assume that you have a good idea about this at this stage.
Initially we will lose some functionality compared to Maemo 5 for number of reasons, e.g. we will not have full audio functionality in May release, and like Aki already described ofono doesn't support all use cases yet. We don't have full list of all of those yet, but on june we will try to create something like that ( or perhaps someone that is interested does it for us ;) >I've heard that the following components will be binary blobs (closed >hardware specs being the cause): > >BME >Bluetooth >GLES (does this mean that any 3D stuff won't work?) >Wifi firmware > >Is that a complete list? Is that list correct? There will be different classes of binary blobs, like - Firmwares; Wlan, BT, Modem - Closed 3rd party SW; GLX/GLES, Accelerated video codecs (running on OMAP DSP side), Adobe Flash, Skype - Nokia closed; BME Personally, I don't care much about firmwares, we have always had those also on PC side and I don't think that we easily get rid of them. And if there is desire to work on those, you should talk to chip manufacturers ( I know, in N900 we have Nokia modem ..) 3rd party binaries are usually business model choice of companies behind them, and to open those you should as well talk to respective companies behind them. When it comes to Nokia closed, we are seriously trying to get rid of those in MeeGo scope. Now it looks that BME is not worth of opening as such. >Will it be possible to put free alternatives with less functionality in place >of the binary >blobs? And will an N900 without the binary blobs charge the battery when >plugged in? (this was one thing said on IRC yesterday that didn't make >much sense to me). You can build the image without BME, and yes, without it N900 will NOT load it's battery. Most likely it is possible to develop open source replacement for BME, but at this point I don't know yet if we as Nokia can participate to that kind of project. The problem is, that if you (or someone else) manages to explode the battery with bad charging algorithms or safety limits, bloggers and press will go and hunt Nokia, not the people that are behind it. Before you even press the reply button; I know that this is not good explanation, and you can very easily generate lots of counter arguments. However, at this point we have not had enough time to investigate the issue properly, but my plan is to come back to that on june. ps. Today we have holiday on Finland, and me like many others will be out of office on tomorrow as well. Luckily, we have warm sunny spring weather and laptops can be used outside as well ;) Br, //Harri _______________________________________________ MeeGo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev
