Legal situation

[Mychaela Falconia]

Serg wrote:

> Another alternative, chosen by "western" FOS community is to pretend that
> they never seen the TI code and fully reverse engineered the software to
> run on Calypso chipset. This is the OsmocomBB approach.

Except that in the case of OsmocomBB it can be very easily proven that
not only have they seen TI's code, but made critical and essential use
of it, and not just any TI code, but the one specific version which
they very adamantly denied using, the version from a company with an
'O' and an 'M' in its name:

https://www.freecalypso.org/pipermail/community/2017-April/000361.html

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

> Wait... Are you talking about the firmware or about the specifications

The specific paragraph you replied to was about the firmware.  The
firmware source has been publicly available and practically usable for
a long time (it was me who took the available scattered, fragmented
and not directly usable leaks and transformed them into a practically
usable product), and many sane people in the world (including governments
of progressive countries like Iran) are already using it quite happily,
but a few backward people are restricting themselves from using this
firmware by their own free will because they are scared witless than
some dead ghost of TI might come and sue them.  The paragraph you
replied to was addressed to such people.

> or about the specifications (i. e. what commands for the TI processor
> are available and what they do)?

The documentation in the form of written prose (as opposed to code)
that I am aware of is very incomplete, for many essential chipset
functions the only available documentation is the known working
reference firmware code.

> If you are talking about some firmware whose source already exists since it
> leaked from TI, and the chip already exists as well, then what is FreeCalypso
> project actually doing?

Two things:

1. Building new board-level hardware with Calypso chips, as none of
   the pre-existing phones and modems are suitable for what I am
   interested in.

2. Maintaining our own production firmware based on the source leaks
   from TI.  The leaks in themselves are static frozen artifacts,
   whereas a living software/firmware project needs to be actively
   maintained.

> I've seen something about hardware development at FreeCalypso website.
> My impression was that the project is going to develop a new GSM chip [...]

Not a chip, but board-level hardware.  Unless you are going to eat
them, chips by themselves are not particularly useful, one also needs
a working product board with those chips on it in order to have a
practically usable product.  I make the latter:

https://www.freecalypso.org/fcdev3b.html

M~