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Shuttleworth Answers FSF Call for Free Software Drivers on Edge
WebMink writes "In an interview at OSCON, Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical spoke about the vision behind the Ubuntu Edge phone as a concept device to test features the mobile industry is too conservative to try. Notably, he agreed with the Free Software Foundation's demands that the device should carry no proprietary software and have Free drivers (transcript): '... we'll ship this with Android and Ubuntu, no plans to put proprietary applications on it. We haven't finalized the silicon selection so we're looking at the next generation silicon from all major vendors. I would like to ship it with all Free drivers.'"
Although not a hard promise, it is a promising development.
When the article says "free", it means free as in "free speech", not in "free beer".
No, "free" in this context usually means copyrighted and protected under a license like the GPL (or something similar). The "free" that the FSF endorses is actually more restrictive than public domain, with the objective of forcing developers to share their improvements on the code.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
...free from an NSA backdoor too I'd imagine. In the current climate that may be a real selling point... something people would go out of their way to order online etc...
When you know you depend on silicon designed by others. Here's the thing.I bet Canonical would very much rather have everything on that thing be open-source because if something breaks it's way easier to debug than having to bang your head against the wall that a binary blob of anything represents.
It won't happen. Minimally, the SDR (Software Defined Radio) will be required by the FCC, and other similar regulatory agencies around the world, to have a locked down image, or it won't be licensed for use, period. An SDR is defined to be a combination of the software and hardware, and you can't change one or the other without getting the thing relicensed, or requialified for use on the carrier network in the country in question.
My guess is that they will end up with some flavor of Qualcomm Snapdragon, which runs the baseband firmware in a TZone, which effectively puts it in a hypervisor in the chip, out of reach of any other software running on the chip. This is what Sony did with their recent "root unlocked" handsets, and it's the reason Sony *didn't* unlock their single CPU handsets.
I find the fixation on wanting to use proprietary hardware with FOSS drivers rather counterproductive. If you are buying a graphics card where the vendor does not give you the source for the driver, you have sacrificed your freedom right at the point of sale, where you bought the hardware, so you might as well accept a driver that is closed as well. If you really insist on freedom, you ought to demand hardware that has open specs as well. I am NOT however saying that the effort to write free drivers for proprietary hardware is not admirable. I am just saying that FSF fixation on open software (driver) without insisting on open hardware as well, a contradiction.
And as my grandpa used to say "Girls want ponies, people in hell want ice water, I want a million dollars...that don't mean any of us are gonna get it".
Unless they are gonna kickstarter the chips in the thing it'll be DAMN hard to make it FOSS, simply because the ones making the GPUs, wireless, etc, are about the most proprietary lot on the planet. Hell I don't even think you CAN make a FOSS GPU as everything from texture compression on up is patented up the ass, I know there was a project to make one using an FPGA but I never heard any more about it, probably ran into the legal minefield and ran aground.
So while it'd be nice with so few players in the top tier mobile chip business and with anything and everything patented and licensed from somebody the FSF can say "make it free" all they want, its gonna be damned hard if not impossible to make it truly FOSS and still get decent chips in the thing. Remember even the OLPC 1 couldn't get 100% free because they couldn't find a BIOS and wireless chipset at the time that wasn't proprietary and that was with X86, with ARM its even worse.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Does anyone know where duedil.com gets its Canonical data from?
If I am going to fork over $800, I want to perform at least some due diligence. Is Canonical simply going to use my money to pay downs its current liabilities, which were recently about 19,000,000 GBP higher than its current assets?
https://www.duedil.com/company/06870835/canonical-group-limited
Only because they can't be. Don't confuse what a license doesn't do with with what it can't do.
RMS's motivation was always to get access to other people's work. It angered him that he was denied source to software that wasn't his but was free to use on a device he didn't pay for. The GPL IS about forcing others to "share", there are simply limits to its reach.
Now, it would seem that "user freedom" is somehow nicer that "forcing developers" but it is not. GPLv3 came about not because GPLv2 software isn't free but because RMS wanted to further leverage the license to restrict what hardware vendors do with their property. You can play games with the terms as you like, and FSF does, but it is what it is...further restrictions on freedom. What you can't do with GPL software is anything that RMS doesn't like.
If the GPL could also give RMS the right to take a bite out of your donut it would do that too and if you think RMS isn't that petty then you've forgotten his boycott of organizations that refuse his demand to ad hoc rename every linux product to honor GNU. Remember, RMS has never had to work for a salary. He is stuck in ivory-tower thinking and is on a crusade to deliver justice to those who'd take advantage of other people's collective work. He doesn't care about freedom so much as denying it to those who deny him. It's about his interests, not yours.
FSF is Animal Farm and RMS is the head pig. Sure, we are all equal but RMS is "more equal". Other open source licenses focus on what's really important and other groups put egos where they belong. The FSF is about the "freedom" agenda and is willing to sacrifice actual freedom to further it.
The phone has global support but if you do NOT buy it now, you won't buy it later. The phone will ONLY be available if it is fully funded and you can't buy it afterwards.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
People running Android and custom ROMs frequently replace the radios. This is probably not quite the same as it's mostly just using radios from other models or with minor changes I believe, but it is done.
I assume you are mostly talking about tablets, not phones, here, since the modules are generally surface mount in phones, due to industrial design requirements that phones be relatively small. It's grey market at best to replace a GSM or CDMA module. WiFi modules, the FCC cares a lot less about. If you replace a GSM or CDMA module with another, however, you have to also replace the binary firmware blob with one whose signature the module can verify when you try to load it. So it's effectively a single piece of hardware at that point, since it's replaced as a unit.
The equivalent for hardware radios would be like saying you have to release it in a steel box or something. People hack things and have since radios were invented. It's really the responsibility of the person who owns the device not to break the law.
Sure, and if the seller of the device ends up with an end user being able to violate the law and hack it, then the FCC decertifies the device and forces the manufacturer to issue a recall until such time as the manufacturer remedies the ability of the end user to violate the law and hack the thing, and recertifies. This is expensive as hell for the manufacturer.
The bottom line is that the FCC and other regulatory agencies don't want you to be able to modify the software in an SDR in order to redefine it. They don't want you listening to GSM or CDMA traffic in promiscuous mode and gathering enough data to listen in, but they even more strongly don't want you to have a cell phone that all you have to do is run an app on it and it lets you intercept or jam police or military frequencies, but when not running the app, is totally indistinguishable from an unmodified cell phone.
Part of this is security through obscurity, which won't stop a determined and skilled reverse engineer, but really, you'd have a hard time encrypting your blob and signing it in such a way that a Qualcomm chip is willing to verify it, decrypt it, and verify the decrypted blob as well. It vastly reduces the pool of people capable of actually doing the job to a set small enough that they can "round up the usual suspects".
It sounds like the Ubuntu Mobile people are saying "hey, we want to ship this with no binary blobs but we recognize that in order to get certain features such as a cellular modem or a 3D-capable GPU we may have no choice but to go with a binary blob if we cant find hardware that is 100% open"
Again the tired old debate about "which is more free", GPL2 vs GPL3, GPL vs MIT etc. I'm amazed at how people keep falling for linguistic traps. "Freedom" isn't subject to gradation on a linear scale, necessarily marred by increased regulation nor evenly distributed. As a concept, it's as ill-defined as "love", so arguing about what license is "more free" doesn't make a lot of sense, unless you also fall for the cultural trap that "freedom" is the main moral goal in everything and a necessary attribute/buzzword for garnering support regardless of the issue at hand.
Having said that, I believe the GPL is better because it guarantees the possibility of forking.
Can't believe this anti-GPL flamebait/troll has been modded up.
It's simple: If you don't like GPL (2 or 3 or whatever), don't use/modify/distribute the software, fuck off and write your own.
Those of us who think that GPL (2 and 3) is a guarantee of the freedoms we are interested in will use/modify/distribute GPL software.
Basically, you think the freedom to restrict others freedoms is essential. And that's fine. But don't try to pretend your view is more pro-freedom.
GPLv3 came about not because GPLv2 software isn't free but because RMS wanted to further leverage the license to restrict what hardware vendors do with your property.
Fixed that for ya'.
You are obviously a troll.
I make GPL software. I want to help my neighbors, even you. You may not want to, or you may have other reasons for not making GPL software. More power to you. I respect your right, and I hope you respect my right to publish my software under the license I choose.
You can take my GPL software and use it freely and copy it to all the computers at your office. You can make changes to my software and you are not forced to publish the changes as long as you keep the changes within your office. I allow you to do so.
But if you want to publish my software with any changes you made, I want compensation for my hard work. I don't want your money, you may be a poor student. I want the changes you made, so that I can use them too. This is the license that I chose about my software, and I hope again that you respect it.
Otherwise, please don't use my software. Nobody is forcing you to do so, and certainly not me. There are more than plenty commercial options. Choose one, or make your own.
But the way I see it, is that you complain because you want to profit from my hard work without the compensation I asked for. To paraphrase your argument, you want to take a bite out of my donut, without paying.
How is that even the case? TiVo makes a set top box where the flash is locked after the firmware is installed, but as per GPL2, TiVo publishes the sources - not that it's of any use to anybody since it can't be altered.
Exactly the problem GPL3 was intended to address.
But TiVo made this before selling it to the content provider: it's usually the content provider who includes this in their package. So you get the thing already with the flash locked. On a rare occasion that the content provider might want to upgrade something on the STB, they access your box, do it and then resume operations. Most people neither know nor care. Those who do probably got MythTV or something of that sort.
Public outrage against TiVo-ization predates the integration of TiVo into cable/satellite boxes. I had the original TiVo. It was marketed direct to consumers. No "content provider" involved. It was a stand-alone box. They didn't start integrating it into cable/satellite boxes until years later. It was my hardware, not their hardware. The device phoned-home (quite literally, through the integrated modem) every couple of days to check for new listings and software updates (and presumably report everything I'd watched). However, there was no reason any "content provider" should ever access my hardware.
The reason TiVo did what it did is obvious. They've written a software, that captures the video inputs that they are getting, transcode them into something whose output goes to HDMI or an S-video port, and that's it.
That's not it. The software also output to, say, an MP4 file, which was stored on the hard drive so that the user could watch the video whenever he pleased.
The content providers don't want it to send its output to, say, an MP4 file, which can then be uploaded on YouTube and splashed for the world to see, and so the only reason they agreed to let TiVo, or ReplayTV or anyone else in the same biz do it is so that TiVo prevents such an alteration of the hardware. Essentially, instead of a Flash, had TiVo put it on a masked ROM or even an OTP PROM, they'd have been fine, since the FSF engages in an exercise in sophistry by labeling it a 'circuit'.
This wasn't an issue until later. The original reason TiVo wanted to lock you out of the device was that TiVo wanted to sell you a subscription to their listings service. They were breaking even (or possibly even losing) on the hardware at the time. If users could actually control the hardware, they could get the listings info from another source, depriving TiVo of income. Appeasing "content providers" didn't become an issue until much later.
Bottom line - FSF/RMS didn't bother to find out why TiVo was doing what it did, or didn't care.
Stallman knew exactly why TiVo did what it did, and he did care. He cared that they had taken free software, provided in good faith that users would be able to exercise their freedoms, and they had cheated the public out of all their freedoms by locking the user out in hardware (hence the term TiVo-ization). He cared that TiVo could arbitrarily cease to provide service, leaving the public with millions of paperweights. Stallman doesn't care about their profits. He cares about freedom.