Hi everybody,sorry about the delay, last week's news is from me is more legal news than engineering news, but anyway, Openmoko is all about open engineering so sometimes the legal work is necessary to give us and our community the environment we need...
--- TuesdayInternal meeting to confirm again that Openmoko prefers the GPL and LGPL version 3 over older versions. We don't really force our full- time, part-time or volunteer contributors to use any license, for example raster prefers the BSD license for Enlightenment. But still, the official preference at Openmoko is GPL and LGPL, and specifically in version 3. We will be more careful to uptick the GPL/LGPL version numbers when writing new source codes. I'm not sure whether this has been talked about before, but the 'official' idea behind licenses at Openmoko is like this:
*) Libraries cannot be GPL.The idea is that libraries are what you use to build your house, your private space that you can control in any way you like. Our preference is LGPL, BSD/MIT less so, but still acceptable. GPL is not acceptable.
*) Everything but libraries should be GPL.The idea is that this is the shared public good, democracy. LGPL and even less so BSD/MIT would be acceptable, but not be loved. We think that those licenses defend the rights of developers, but not the rights of the end user.
No need to start any flame wars over this, we do not enforce those rules. We are not entirely happy with Trolltech's GPL dual-licensing for example, but still use their stuff. Same with raster who prefers BSD over LGPL. Anyway the above represents the 'official' preferences.
--- WednesdayAiroha (www.airoha.com) visited us in our office to talk about their Wi-Fi RF chips. We are planning lots of cool features with Wi-Fi, VoIP, Mesh, etc. But for many of these things, we need access to the firmware in the Wi-Fi chips. We started thinking how we can do our own Wi-Fi baseband chip one day :-)
Big legal discussion. Openmoko signed exactly 50 NDAs so far since starting the company 1 year ago. We looked at the 10 most important of those NDAs, mostly with semiconductor companies, table attached below. So we looked a all sorts of ideas how to play by the rules but still be as open as possible. Have a tech support hotline to answer specific questions by looking it up in the documentation. Hire employees on a 1$/month basis. Start a documentation project on our wiki. Lower the barriers of entering into an NDA with Openmoko (web form) to at least get access to some NDA documentation - the ones not restricted to full- time employees.
No silver bullet yet, we will keep looking. Ideas are welcome :-)Bottom line we continue as before: Big preference for chips that have fully open documentation. Grudgingly accept NDAs if there is no other way, then make sure there is a well documented GPL driver at least...
--- FridayWe decided to take another serious look at doing a design around the Samsung 6410 SoC, after having postponed work on it a few months ago. Planning another attempt at asking Samsung Korea to open up documentation :-)
So much for last week, let's not forget that lots of people were busy fixing bugs all over the place too...
Best Regards, Wolfgang
Openmoko_NDA_Analysis.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
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