Paul Sokolovsky <[email protected]> wrote: > Good project. It would be great if you worked on current, not > historical, hardware, but I agree it should be done step by step.
How would you propose I (or any other free community member for that matter, outside of the closed circle of NDA-bound Qualcomm employees) could work on current as opposed to historical hardware when there is absolutely NO documentation publicly available for any baseband chips that are newer than the "ancient" ones from TI I'm working on? Do you have your own personal armed forces who could invade USA with troops, take control of the city of San Diego, storm Qualcomm's headquarters with a Spetsnaz unit and seize their chipset documentation and source code? If not, how do you propose we could obtain the necessary documentation and reference source which they are unwilling to release freely? Yes, the Calypso/LoCosto/etc chipsets from TI are "ancient" by today's terms. But that may be the very reason why we, the free software community, now possess everything we need in order to be able to run free firmware on them. TI completely exited the wireless baseband chipset business in 2009, i.e., they stopped making these chips, did NOT come out with any "successors", i.e., they left it to open companies (their former competitors) to fill the void, and they want absolutely nothing more to do with this stuff. All offices where that work was done were closed and most of the employees who did the work were let go - at least those who weren't interested in moving to Texas - and I surely wouldn't be interested in living there if I were them. Some of those laid-off employees surely didn't want to see their work perish, hence the source code and documentation got leaked. I am not aware of any even remotely comparable source+documentation leak being available for any newer chipset, hence I don't see any realistic prospects of how we could run free modem/baseband/radio firmware on anything newer. But here's the thing, there is still a *huge* unsold surplus left of these old chips, enough to build tens of thousands of phones or modems - so I really don't see what's the big deal about these chips being "historical" as you said. And if we ever do exhaust that surplus, hiring some Chinese "pirate" chip fab to make verbatim clones of these old chips will probably still be a lot cheaper than a private army to go to war against USA in order to liberate Qualcomm's "intellectual property"... > Also please consider having a mirror of your codebase on github to > popularize the project and improve access to it. It is currently on bitbucket.org - how is it worse than github? And the source repository is Mercurial, not git - can github support Hg? VLR, SF _______________________________________________ Replicant mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/replicant
