Josh Branning <[email protected]> wrote: > IIRC, some of the code you have has been leaked, possibly illegally. > Whilst this is not a technical problem, wouldn't people wanting a free > and open source baseband stand more of a chance convincing regulators, > if the code was completely legitimate instead?
If you are too timid to protest against unjust and immoral laws by breaking them, then my project is not for you. My project is for the brave. Brave men and women are those who are not afraid of breaking tyrannical laws. If you went to high school or college in USA, did they teach you the so-called social contract theory? In all those American government etc classes that I had to take, they always taught that the powers of governments stem from a social contract, a contract whereby the people agree to obey laws made by the government as long as that government serves the interest of the people. However, what they don't emphasize enough is that this conceptual social contract has a rebellion and revolution clause: if a government becomes tyrannical, the people have not only a right but a duty to rebel against this government. The American war of independence from Britain was justified on those grounds, but today's laws are far more tyrannical that those of 18th century Britain. A copyright law that makes a piece of abandonware NOT go into the public domain even though its original maker company has completely disowned it and washed their hands of it more than 5 years ago is tyrannical, and the people have a *duty* to break such tyrannical laws. A law that makes it illegal to operate a cellphone you made yourself without paying millions of dollars to an "approved" certification lab, even though your home-made cellphone operates 100% correctly and is absolutely indistinguishable from an approved one in terms of its network transmissions, is also a tyrannical law which the people have a moral duty to break. I argue that the most effective way to make the anti-free-phone laws (both copyright and type approval) completely unenforceable is to put these lawbreaking free phones into the hands of so many people that it would be logistically impossible for the pigs to go after all of us, as there would be far too many of us for them to go after. But if we wish to put such a free phone in the hands of every Joe and Jane on the street, the available surplus of old Motorola, Pirelli and Openmoko phones won't be enough; we need to produce new phones of our own instead. But we won't be able to start working towards the making of our own new phones until and unless we raise $6000 USD to reverse-eng Openmoko's GTA02 PCB - so it is now up to you, the community at large, to make a difference. Here is the crowdfunding page again: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/free-software-cellular-baseband Viva la Revolucion, SF _______________________________________________ Replicant mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/replicant
