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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.
...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...
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.
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.