Draft letter to Texas Instruments

[Dmitry]

Hi freecalypso list, 

what do you think about to make some kind of List of Signatures and
announce it on Hackers News (with brief introduction of project) and
maybe popularise it a bit in relevant communities. Then, when some
amount of votes and feedback will be collected, send the official
letter to TI. 

It may turns the private request to public event that theoretically may
be taken as a good PR gesture for TI and increase the probability of
positive decision. 

Regarding the draft: 

I incline that it would be better to keep more "dry" style (e.g. as it
was offered by Josh Branning) for official request but use Mychaela's
expressive approach for public message. 


Dmitry 



On Tue, 15 Dec 2015 17:35:08 GMT
falcon at ivan.Harhan.ORG (Mychaela Falconia) wrote:

> For a bit of contrast, here is *my* draft letter to TI which I
> composed back in May of this year, but which I never sent.  It was
> meant to be printed and snail-mailed, hence it's written in troff
> with -ms macros: I'm a very old-fashioned UNIX user.
> 
> .TL
> Request to license obsolete GSM baseband software
> .LP
> Dear Texas Instruments,
> .PP
> My name is Mychaela Falconia, and I am a private individual not
> affiliated with any company or organization whatsoever.
> I am writing to you with a request for permission to make legal use
> of a certain extremely obsolete piece of software which is believed
> to be under TI's copyright, a piece of software which I am currently
> forced to use in ways which are believed to be illegal because this
> ultra-obsolete software is the only means available to me to relieve
> my suffering for which there is no other known cure.
> .PP
> The software in question is the reference firmware for the Calypso and
> LoCosto GSM baseband processors which (to the best of my knowledge)
> are no longer made, sold or supported by TI, and whose end of life
> occurred many years ago.
> Just to be clear, I am \fInot\fP asking TI to provide me with a copy
> of this software or to provide any support for it, instead I am
> merely asking for permission to make use of the source code which I
> already have \(em I found it freely on the Internet via Google
> searches. .PP
> I suffer from a condition which I call proprietary software dysphoria.
> With this condition I experience severe distress whenever I am forced
> to use any piece of electronic technology which I am unable to
> improve myself (fix functional defects) or customize to suit my own
> tastes and preferences because I lack the source code for the
> firmware that controls the operation of the device.
> In the present phase of my life, the devices that trigger my
> dysphoria most acutely are cellular telephone handsets, particularly
> the plain, non-smart ones \(em I have never used a smartphone and
> never will, as they are far too complex for my minimal needs.
> .PP
> I currently have a fairly large collection of old cellphones of the
> plain, non-smart kind that have been built with TI's Calypso chipset.
> All of these phones were made by small boutique manufacturers that
> have long been out of business, hence contacting these manufacturers
> for assistance is absolutely impossible.
> All of these phones also exhibit various crippling defects which are
> clearly the fault of the firmware they came with, rather than the
> hardware: badly misdesigned user interface, occasional misbehavior on
> the GSM network, seemingly random flash file system corruption etc.
> As an expert embedded software engineer I know without a doubt that I
> could fix all of these flaws if I had the source code for their
> firmware, but given that the manufacturers in question are long out
> of business, it is very likely that this source code has been lost
> forever, gone to the great bit bucket in the sky.
> .PP
> However, after spending several years of my life searching every
> obscure corner of the Internet for any and all information on the old
> GSM baseband chipsets that used to be made by TI, I have located
> copies of some of the deliverables which you apparently provided to
> your chipset customers (handset manufacturers) back in those
> long-bygone days \(em the CD enclosed with this letter contains what
> I managed to find in terms of actual code, as opposed to merely
> verbal documentation. I am now actively working on a project to
> improve my quality of life by replacing the original proprietary
> firmware in aftermarket Calypso phones made years ago by long-defunct
> manufacturers with a new fully
> functional source-enabled firmware which I reconstruct from the
> fragments of your TCS2.1.1 and TCS3.2 firmware sources which I
> managed to find, as presented on the enclosed CD.
> .PP
> I now have everything I need for my project in terms of materials,
> knowledge and tools, hence I don't need any materials or technical
> support from TI. However, the free software community has shunned me
> and my project: they argue that my project is illegal because I am
> producing a derived work based on the scattered bits and pieces of TI
> source code I found on the Internet, code which they say is still
> copyrighted by TI even though the product line in question has been
> defunct for many years, without having obtained explicit permission
> from TI as the copyright holder to do what I seek. .PP
> I thus wonder if you might perchance be willing to make my life a
> little easier by giving me explicit permission to do the following:
> .IP (1)
> Maintain my own Calypso GSM firmware that is a derived work based on
> the old TI source bits contained in the 3 Internet finds on the
> enclosed CD; .IP (2)
> Run the firmware from (1) on devices which I legitimately bought on
> the used surplus market and which were made in a distant past by
> companies which, I presume, legitimately paid whatever royalty TI
> asked of them for running TI-developed software on their products;
> .IP (3)
> Share my work (1) with other people who suffer from the same condition
> and have the same needs as I do.
> .LP
> In the interest of honesty, I have to admit that I absolutely
> \fIcannot\fP abstain from doing my project even if you deny me the
> permission I am asking for \(em instead I will have to take my
> project underground and work on it in total social isolation while
> being shunned and ostracized by everyone around me, and also living
> in constant fear of being arrested and imprisoned for the crime of
> copyright infringement. But as bleak as this alternative is, I have
> absolutely no other choice: because of my psychological condition it
> is absolutely impossible for me to live a meaningful life without
> having firmware in my ancient Calypso-based ``dumbphone'' which I
> compile myself from source and which I can therefore improve and
> customize. Therefore, I deeply wish that you find enough kindness and
> compassion in your hearts to make it legal for me to do what I cannot
> live without. .sp 1.5
> .PP
> Thank you for your time and consideration,
> .sp
> .nf
> Mychaela Falconia
> mychaela at ivan.Harhan.ORG
> 
> -- EOF --
> 
> Notice how, when I composed the above draft back in May, I wasn't
> asking for any additional code pieces.  Two things have happened
> between then and now that sparked my current burning desire to obtain
> a more complete copy of TCS211:
> 
> * Over the course of 2015 (starting right then in May) we have got our
>   blob-free gcc-built GSM firmware up and running.  Back in 2014 I had
>   put it together using LoCosto versions of L1 and G23M (the two
> pieces which are binary blobs in our copy of TCS211, hence the only
> available sources were LoCosto and TSM30), I got it to compile, but
> it wasn't complete enough to do any real testing, i.e., to tell if it
> even works at all or not.  The code became complete (all necessary
> pieces integrated) in the spring of this year, and over the summer we
> got it mostly working.  And only in the most recent fall months did I
>   reach the realization that our current LoCosto-based L1 code is
>   broken on the Calypso in a way which I can't figure out how to fix
>   except in one of the following two ways:
> 
>   (a) obtain a copy of some original L1 source that targets the
> Calypso (right version, not TSM30) and not LoCosto, or
> 
>   (b) painstakingly reconstruct this source from the working binary
>       objects version.
> 
> * This August I managed to find and obtain (from a seller in Singapore
>   who otherwise deals mostly with medical equipment, of all things) a
>   piece of very historical actual hardware made by TI, an official
>   development kit for their hardware and software:
> 
>   https://www.freecalypso.org/boards/ds-pics/
> 
>   I would really, really love to make this baby run, but it has TI's
>   older Clara RF (not the Rita used in the commercially-made phones
>   and modems we target), and we have no driver code for Clara at all,
>   neither source nor object.  Hence the only way I'll ever get this
>   D-Sample board running would be if we obtain a more complete copy of
>   TCS211.  D-Sample was one of the two official targets for TCS211
>   (the other being Leonardo, which is the baseline from which the
>   commercial phones and modems we target were made), hence a complete
>   copy of TCS211 should include everything needed in order to run on
>   the D-Sample.
> 
> M~
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