Legal situation

[Mychaela Falconia]

viva astoria <viva.astoria at yandex.ru> wrote:

> Do you know what these legal restrictions were?

Openmoko had the source for TI's modem firmware from their parent
company FIC, but they maintained it as proprietary, releasing only
binaries stripped of all symbolic info.  They kept saying that if they
did otherwise (i.e., if they had released whatever source they had in
direct disregard of copyrights and NDAs as the user community has been
demanding for years), they would have been sued by TI.

> And will freecalypso be able to overcome them? How?

The simplest way would be to move to a country like North Korea or
Iran that does not have any copyright treaties with USA or France or
Germany and would not recognize TI's copyright claims as legitimate.
As a specific example, I know of one Iranian government contractor
company who is already using FreeCalypso firmware on their own custom
hardware that includes a Calypso modem.

If you want FreeCalypso to be legal in some country that is not like
North Korea or Iran, you could try convincing your local legislators
to pass a special law that would make TI's copyright claims null and
void in your country XYZ.

Alternatively you could try talking to TI and beg and plead with them
to voluntarily relinquish their copyright claims on their very dead
and very ancient abandonware and release it into the public domain.  I
am guessing that you would probably need to wave a few million dollars
in front of them just to get their attention.

M~