Newer MTK chipsets

[Mychaela Falconia]

Hi Serg,

Thank you for your review.  I have always assumed that the leaks
available for the newer MTK chipsets are significantly inferior to
what we have from TI, but because I live in a cave and don't pay
attention to the outside world, I needed confirmation from someone who
is more in touch with the outside world's current happenings.

It was also important to get this confirmation from people like you
and DS who are members of the FreeCalypso community.  The problem with
the people on other phone-related mailing lists (OsmocomBB, Replicant,
Tinkerphones) is that they all engage in the cult of license worship,
and religiously refuse to use any software that is practically free,
but not legally free.  Thus even if there were a complete 100% source
leak of turnkey-functional modem firmware for some 3G/4G chipset,
these license worshippers would refuse to use it (nothing except a
lifetime-wasting from-scratch reimplementation would ever be good
enough for them), and they would probably build a wall of silence and
ostracism around the very existence of any such leak, so that I would
never hear about it.

Hence it is very important to have people like you and DS who are not
license worshippers, who would not be averse to making as-is direct
reuse of a leaked proprietary 3G/4G modem source if one were to turn
up, and who keep their eyes open for any such leaks.

> I have this board
> https://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Fernvale_Main_Page based on MTK
> chipset

I could never understand why those people went to the trouble of
designing and building this MT6260 board.  It would be one thing if
someone built an experimentation/development board around some
3G-capable chipset in the hope of liberating it, but MT6260 is 2G-only
just like the Calypso.  If you are only supporting GSM/2G and not 3G
or 4G, why in the world would you want to throw away everything that
OsmocomBB and FreeCalypso projects have accomplished over the years
and restart from zero on a different chipset platform just for the
sake of novelty??

I actually exchanged a few emails with Bunnie (one of the two key
people behind Fernvale) back in early 2015, and he was telling me that
Calypso is too old, that nobody supports it any more, that MT6260 was
"hot these days" and hence it was a better platform in his opinion...
Yet it apparently didn't matter to those guys that for TI's chipsets
we have extensive source leaks and two successful projects (ours and
OsmocomBB) that have working GSM functionality based on the available
leaked sources and docs, whereas for MTK there is nothing but a big
mass of binary libs...  I just simply don't understand what these guys
were (or still are) thinking.

M~