On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 1:14 AM, joerg Reisenweber <jo...@openmoko.org> wrote: > While rewriting blobs is a long term minor goal of CSSU [1], we won't do a > complete rewrite of every closed blob for Neo900 fremantle-port. Actually if > we did, we could use any arbitrary hardware ülatform and just recompile the > completely liberated fremantle for it. We wouldn't need a GTA04-N900 that's > close to the original N900 hw-wise. The idea of GTA04-N900 is to reduce the > hw-diffs to an amount that can get handled in kernel/drivers by patching them. > You probably know that kernel and kernel driver modules are FOSS in maemo.
Yeah, Neo900 won't be associated with any specific operating system. SHR, QtMoko or anything else that works now on GTA04 should be very easy, if not trivial, to run on Neo900. For this community, Neo900 is just a upgraded GTA04 in different case (well, it might be that Neo900 will cause upgrade of GTA04 itself, so it will be rather something like "variant of GTA04" rather than "upgrade" to it). But there's one reason why we need "Fremantle Porting Task Force" - demand. Maemo community waited for N900 successor for so long, and with such low demand as we're struggling with those devices, every single willing buyer helps us a lot. Also, this is not Nokia-owned OS anymore - community owns it and effort to ditch closed blobs and switch to free replacements is ongoing, as Joerg pointed out. There are also some initiatives for rebasing Fremantle on top of current Debian and to stay as close to upstream as possible. Those efforts slowly die together with N900. When there are less and less developers, the goal of "Freemantle" is more and more away. Neo900 is meant to resurrect this community as soon as possible. While joining "Freemantle" effort into Neo900 project would mean inevitable failure (not enough manpower, people being disappointed due to unstable software etc.), giving Maemo community something pretty much rock-solid as a good base for future work (even with still with some closed parts) might be better idea for our long term goals. It might be that reimplementing some OS part will be easier than adding some compatibility layer in kernel. In such cases, "Freemantle" will even benefit directly from "porting task force" work. And still, if you're not interested in Fremantle, just ignore it. There are people who are - they will generate some demand, so we'll be able to get bigger production runs, so everyone will be happier. Nevertheless, Neo900 will stay true to everything that GTA04 represents right now. It will just get new form factor to attract different people. -- Sebastian Krzyszkowiak, dos http://dosowisko.net/ _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
