Bob Ham <r...@settrans.net> wrote: > then > > the FreeCalypso firmware is not based on OM's historical firmwares. > > Therefore, the statement regarding the recently released moko13 > firmware update was not false.
The person I was refuting did not say that the new fw is not based on OM's historical fw, he said that it is not based on "the original licensed firmware for Openmoko devices". A reasonable interpretation of that "original licensed fw" phrase is "firmware which TI licensed to OM", which would be the 20070608 build of TI's TCS211 fw. FC is based on the latter, hence the statement is false in this reasonable interpretation. It is true that FreeCalypso fw is based not only on this TCS211 fw from 20070608, but also on a more recent TI source (TCS3/LoCosto) that was released free to the world in the spring of 2012 by Dr. Amol Sarva, the CEO of Peek Inc., as that company was closing, but both of these starting sources were equally essential to allowing FC fw to become what it has become (a deblobbed fw rebuilding from source, with bugfixes and improvements over the original blob-laden TCS211 version which OM must have used), and neither of the two sources can be said to be more primary or more essential or more critical than the other. However, the specific configuration of FC Magnetite fw that is featured in the moko13 release is very conservative in that wherever some code from the TCS3/LoCosto source has been used to replace some formerly binary-only code from TCS211 (L1 and main.lib), that new code has been massaged to compile into a perfect match to the original blob, as verified through disassembly, modulo some bug-fixing changes like fixing the floating inputs bug described earlier, so those parts are still effectively TCS211-based despite using the new source - we just regained the ability to study and modify those parts by deblobbing them. The more aggressive change of fully replacing the TCS211 blob version of the G23M protocol stack with the new TCS3 full source version (TCS2/TCS3 hybrid config) is not included in moko13 (this hybrid config still needs to have its bugs shaken out), but is planned for the next release. Once FreeCalypso makes the transition to the hybrid config with this entirely new G23M PS version, then you can correctly say that it is no longer based on the same TI baseline as OM's historical fw, but not until then. I hope that my explanation clarifies this firmware situation for everyone. I am sure that some people are going to argue that my continued maintenance of and improvements to OM's firmware are illegal because I am not an NDA-bound employee of that company and thus have no right to work on the code they got from TI, but then you need to remember Openmoko The Company *no longer exists*, hence it would not be possible for *anyone* to be an employee of that no-longer-existing company. So if your lawyer tells you that the no-longer-existing status of Openmoko-Inc means that no one in the world can legally make improvements to their firmware and your only legal option is to forever use their ancient firmware from 2009 or earlier with bugs in it, then so be it. For the rest of Humankind who are not so deathly afraid of lawyers, the new and improved firmware is freely available. M~ _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community