Draft letter to Texas Instruments

[Mychaela Falconia]

Hi Josh,

And thank you for writing the draft letter.  I will comment on its
content a little later, as right now I am very tired - exhausted from
dealing with a certain transphobic bigot on the Replicant mailing list
who could not grasp the simple concepts that I am now a she and not a
he, and that Mychaela Falconia is my new real name, not some kind of
pseudonym concocted for the purpose of hiding from copyright enforcers.

Now let me introduce Josh: he also comes from the Replicant mailing
list, but unlike the other guy he seems to have no problem with me
being a woman. :)  Josh seems to be quite interested in what FreeCalypso
has to offer technically and practically, but he is deathly afraid of
criminal prosecution for copyright infringement, hence he has been
asking me to ask TI (on behalf of the FreeCalypso project) for
permission to use their code under a free software license.

Under different circumstances I would not have engaged in any endeavor
that gives an appearance of legitimacy to the despicable religion of
copyright and license worship, but those on this list (FreeCalypso
community) already know that I have another reason why I would like to
try my luck in reasoning with TI: we don't have a source for the
proper TCS211 version of L1, only other not-quite-fitting versions,
and while I am certain that we can reconstruct the necessary bits by
reverse eng if we can't find that missing original source, the effort
may be rather monstrous, hence I am trying to leave no stone unturned
looking for that original source piece before we give up on it and
engage in the brutally painful RE effort.  Leaving no stone unturned
includes asking TI, and if I'm going to ask them for help with source
pieces, naturally the question of license terms will come up: thus I
decided to combine my and Josh's otherwise separate quests into one,
and get the rest of our community behind it as well.

I have my own thoughts on what we should say to TI, but like I said,
I'll write about that later - too tired right now.  I did, however, do
a little homework toward finding *whom* to contact at TI (which is
really the most challenging part): I confirmed today that TI's office
in San Diego (which happens to be very close to my neck of the woods)
is still open and operating.  This tidbit is significant in that it is
the only office of TI USA I know of that was involved in the now-
defunct baseband chipset business; the rest was done in Europe,
primarily in the Nice, France office which appears to have been fully
shut down and dissolved.

One of the old TI presentations we found says that the San Diego
office did 3G work, and my own experience confirms: a coworker of mine
at my current day job used to work there, and guess what she worked on
- that's right, 3G.  But she and the others in that group still had to
interoperate a bit with the older 2G stuff our FreeCalypso project is
concerned with - they were using some other company's 3G chip and
making it work together with TI's LoCosto for GSM/2G.

My coworker told me that her whole group was laid off when TI got out
of the baseband chipset business, but as I just confirmed today, the
office itself is still there.  I have no idea what they are working on
in there these days - no way to tell, could be anything.  My next step
will be asking my coworker (the next time I catch her, may take a few
days) if she perchance remembers the name of the manager she used to
work for at TI San Diego, or anyone else sufficiently high in there
to have a chance of still being with TI.

If we can find someone at TI who remembers that this stuff once existed,
we would have a much higher chance of getting somewhere than if our
petition is received by someone who has no slightest idea what we are
talking about, and wouldn't be able to look it up as all traces of
TI's former involvement in this business have been erased.

M~