Slashdot Mirror
DS Wifi Bounty Set
Chris_Yates writes "A bounty has been set to go to the first person to release an open-source tcp/ip implementation for Nintendo DS's wifi hardware capabilities. It may not include illegal source from the SDK, it must compile under a free compiler, preferrably GCC, and you can use other libraries as long as they are non-contaminating. There are also three milestones to the bounty, the first one winning 50%, and the second two winning 25% of the bounty. They are: 1) Figuring out the register set to accomplish (specific list) 2) Implementing correct connect/disconnect code and implementing correct send/recieve code, each of which works both with DSes and PCs and 3) Bootstrapping TCP/IP (or, UDP/IP)"
This has been out for a while (last april):http://users.belgacom.net/bn967347/
Here's another explanation: http://www.aaronrogers.com/nintendods/wifime.php
and also of DS interest: http://ds.darkain.com/hack/
will the bounty go to the already very rich Nintendo?
No. The end product must be permissively licensed free software, and Nintendo has to my knowledge never published such a program. In fact, some believe that Sony is marginally more likely to do so for the PSP, especially given that it has released the Net Yarôze kit (for PS1) and the Linux kit (for PS2).
A GPLed driver will be considered unusable by much of the homebrew scene. We will simply not look at it and continue developing a truely public domain library. GPL is considered "infecting" because it not only controls its own distribution but also the distribution of all code built against it.
Seems like the guy isn't that innocent. I wonder what he'll do with all the money if someone else release a working driver under the GPL...
Wait for someone to do it right, pretty much. What's this about innocence? I even gave explicit language stating a money release clause at six months, ffs.
The reason that contaminating licenses aren't allowed is simple. I'm part of a homebrew community consisting entirely of people whose greatest dream is to go commercial. It would be counterproductive to force someone to rip the network stack out the second they made the cut.
Besides, almost everyone's stack of choice is lwIP, whose stack is commercial friendly. The TCP/IP part isn't the hard part; the only reason I put any money towards that at all was to convince people that the end product would be easy to use, and thusly to give money (huhu.) The hard part is figuring out how the actual hardware works. That's what the bounty is really about.
StoneCypher is Full of BS