Allan Mwenda <[email protected]> wrote: > Could you get a simple game on there like tower of hanoi? That would rock.
Because I do not expect to make any money on this project and am doing it primarily for my own personal use instead, I do not plan on implementing any UI firmware features other than those I need for my own use, and games aren't among the latter. However, the *complete C source code* for the entire firmware, both the UI and the radio protocol layers, will be freely published, so if you want some game or whatever, you can implement it yourself, or hire any C programmer of your choice to implement it for you. When you buy a PC or a laptop, do you insist that the hardware manufacturer ship it to you with some particular game or whatever installed, or else you won't buy? I expect not, as that would be rather silly - you can just sudo apt-get install whatever you like. It should be the same with phones, including dumbphones. I realize that most people currently cannot fathom the idea of modifying the UI/UX (user experience) firmware on their dumbphones to their own liking, and are similarly incapable of distinguishing between hardware and firmware features - that's because up until now *no one* has made a dumbphone with free firmware. But that situation is about to change. > And Dual SIM too, How important is this feature to you? Is it more important than freedom? Is it more important to you than having the radio firmware in full source code form? At the present time the only GSM baseband chipsets for which We the People possess the radio firmware source code are TI Calypso and TI LoCosto. I am currently building a reusable modem module based on the former; I will then use this module to build my Free Dumb Phone, but anyone else is also welcome to take my free GSM modem module and use it in their free smartphone design. However, these TI chipsets are absolutely incapable, in hardware terms, of supporting more than one SIM socket. All those dual SIM phones use MTK or Spreadtrum chips instead. There are some MTK semi-sources floating around, see: ftp://ftp.ifctf.org/pub/GSM/MTK/ However, code for the GSM radio protocols and many other interesting things is in the form of object blobs, not actual source. Thus the older, non-dual-SIM-capable TI chipsets are the only ones for which we have the full source for everything. So given a choice between a single SIM phone with fully free firmware and a dual SIM phone whose fw is at least partially closed and proprietary (because fully free fw is not currently possible on the dual-SIM-capable chipsets), which would you choose? For my own personal use I want a dumbphone with the TI Calypso chipset running fully liberated firmware. Hence the phone I'm building will only have one SIM socket. > Unless you are doing something illegal what does it matter if the > telecom company read your texts to your girlfriend? I certainly do wish for an end-to-end encrypted mode of communication, both voice and text. This functionality can be implemented over mobile-to-mobile transparent CSD (circuit switched data) calls, which work just fine in my part of the world, and I estimate that it will probably be possible to implement this functionality on a Calypso dumbphone. However, I won't even start seriously looking into it until *after* I have built a basic Free Dumb Phone. > I think this dumbphone will be awesome. It will certainly be awesome *for me*, but considering that every person with whom I have conversed on this subject wants (or seems to want) something very different from what I'm building, I really don't know if anyone other than me would want to use the phone which I will actually produce. But that's OK: I am building this Free Dumb Phone for my own personal use, not to please anyone else. It is simply not possible to please everyone, and my own needs come first - it's called scratching a personal itch, the primary motivating factor for all FOSS development. SF _______________________________________________ Replicant mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/replicant
