Greetings all, I just wanted to give a quick update on the status of Android on the Freerunner as supported by Koolu. Currently we are looking at licensing issues with respect to the global market with particular reference to the media codecs included in Android, but are still making great progress on an image for distribution. Ironically, this puts us in a situation where it will be easier for us to release actual source code, build tools and instructions, before actual binary images. We will be announcing everything tomorrow from a telecommunications conference in Brazil.
In the last two years of working with Koolu, I have had the opportunity of being in direct tutelage of Jon "Maddog" Hall, which has helped shape my views on open source. With his permission, I am posting the message below on his behalf to insure that it made it to the community list. Best regards, Brian Code Greetings to the list, First of all, I might say the the role of "Chief Advocate" for Openmoko was the idea of the conference organizers, not me. I was happy to be either the CTO of Koolu or the Executive Director of Linux International, but since I was at the conference at the request of Openmoko, and since I was on a panel representing the "openness" of their philosophy, the organizers wanted a title that reflected that... Secondly, Koolu does "work" with Openmoko in many ways, so I did not "indicate" that we were working together. We are working together. Third, I am an "open source advocate", actually leaning toward "Free Software". But I am also a pragmatist, and there are some times when you have to tread lightly with "openness" until you find out what is going on. So a short time ago Google released a massive amount of code called "Android". Since Koolu was not part of the Open Handset Alliance we could only look at it from the outside like a lot of other people. Recently an issue was brought up regarding patent royalties due on various codecs inside of the code. Even though the code itself is under the Apache license, in various jursidictions royalties have to be paid on the distribution of that code due to patents that are infringed. Sometimes a lot of these royalties are bunded with the hardware, so software people do not really have to recognize them. Some distributions of Linux get around this by writing code that allows for these royalty-bearing segments to be dynamically linked separately from a code build. Ubuntu and Debian both do this as distributions. Unfortunately we found that while the royalty bearing code for Android was in a separate source code directory, the code could not be built without that royalty bearing code being included in the binaries. This created the issue of Openmoko removing the binaries from their server. In my opinion they did the right thing. Rather than jeoprodise Android, Openmoko and Google, they temporarily removed the offending code. I say "temporarily" because I feel that once the issue is completely understood there will be a work-around that will allow open source developers to move ahead. In the meantime our team of programmers is working on the issue. We are talking with the companies that originally wrote the code trying to understand the exact use of it, and we are talking with the licensing agencies to understand the implications. I am encouraging the company that first introduced the multimedia codecs to work with the Open Handset Alliance to identify these areas and other potentially royalty-bearing areas that might affect Android, and to make them more visible, so people can understand and deal with them. I can not speak entirely for the company of Koolu. While I am the CTO, I am not a major stockholder nor a director of the company. I can tell you that Andrew Greig, the CEO and Brian Code, the Technical Director both know, understand and appreciate Open Source. As far as I know it is the intention of Koolu to contribute back the changes that we make to the Android code to the community. Koolu understands the leverage that is inherent in Open Source. Recently we made some announcements of timeframes for putting the code up on the web. Those were formulated before we knew about this royalty "issue", but our intent is to proceed as fast as possible to meet those goals. I hope this answers people's questions and issues around this. Warmest regards, maddog
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