Mike Montour wrote: > For what it's worth, I would rank your #3 ahead of #2 by a large > margin. It is very important for users to be able to upgrade their > firmware.
I fully agree. That policy never made sense to me. One big issue of is that this goes in the opposite direction of what hardware manufacturers are doing: old school hardware design kept complexity low and involved a lot of testing, because any major flaw meant that products using that components were broken. Upgradeable firmware changes this dramatically, since products can be fixed in the field. Even many hardware problems can be solved or at least worked around in software (e.g., think of our SD vs. GPS issue). This means that components can ship as soon as the basic hardware has been verified, but all the rest of the functionality may take a while to mature. And, of course, there is a natural tendency towards making things more complex as well, which increases the probability that a firmware upgrade will be needed. Furthermore, in communications, security against attacks carried out over the network becomes an issue, particularly if these attacks affect a large class of devices and thus make them an attractive target. If Openmoko deny themselves and/or its customers the possibility to perform firmware upgrades, but hardware vendors expect such upgrades to be needed in the lifetime of a product, this has the following consequences: - we cannot use new chips, because their firmware hasn't stabilized yet - once firmware has stabilized, the focus of its maker has likely shifted to newer products, giving us less support - the time in the chip's life cycle between the hardware being sound and the firmware being stable cannot be overlaid with our own development process, thus shortening the effective lifespan of these chips - we have to prepare for recalls or major "send in" repairs - customers will have to consider the risk that Openmoko will not be able or willing to perform a firmware upgrade the customers consider critical So I'd be very happy to see that "no firmware changes" policy go. I actually wonder if there wasn't some miscommunication at its origin. After all, many a hard disk's firmware and even the microcode of many CPUs can be upgraded, and I haven't heard the FSF call for a ban of processing or storage ;-) - Werner _______________________________________________ devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
