I don't know whether others will see this as good news, or bad..... In the interests of disclosure and before any rumours start circulating, (a couple of other people know now), I am in discussions with a company about them selling a product based on my, (what would otherwise have never seen a public release), Bone Player design. Whilst that will be for profit, (by them), before any accusations are levelled about me profiteering from the open source work of others, the payment I have asked for, is if they do so using the F20 based image I have produced, they have to make a community image available, free of charge, for the Wandboard.
For the current incantation of my F20 based image, which the Bone Player depends on, a single image is built from scratch, using exactly the same mechanism that Fedora upstream uses to generate their release images, with customisations and package additions, which runs on several platforms. And before anyone asks how that is possible, (if anyone even cares), booting the same image on Wandboard, Cubietruck and BeagleBone..... The clever bit, if there is such a thing, that makes it board specific when downloaded, is although on the web server filesystem the base image is one file, the Tomcat servlet, which handles the download, where you select the board, replaces the first couple of kb, where the board specific uboot is located, on-the-fly, as part of the download. Thus you get a board specific image, from a single core image. ie. the uboot is added as part of the download process. (Another significant piece to the puzzle was the back-port of the extlinux boot functionality from F21 rawhide to the F20 image, thus dropping the requirement for the first partition VFAT, for booting the BeagleBone.) I have also asked for a second "form" of payment.... It is monetary, but not up-front and only in the case of legal claims against any "work" I did for the CS project. I have *not* asked for any other kind of monetary payment, now or in the future, nor do I want any. I am not seeking to profit from this in any way! If this doesn't sit well with one or more people, I am sorry, but I believe if this deal is done, it will be best for me and the best I can currently do for the people who own and have bought a Wandboard, with the specific intention of using what should have been a Community Squeeze image, on them. Perhaps over a period of time, the community, can develop/build/distribute their own software images, but in the interests of having something actually available to replace the CS image in the short term, I think this makes sense. If it makes me a pariah from a community perspective, so be it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JackOfAll's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3069 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=99395 _______________________________________________ unix mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/unix
