Legal situation

[Mychaela Falconia]

Serg wrote:

> FreeCalypso is using existing chipset to produce a new product. As of today
> FCDEV3B development board is available, which is designed to expose all
> Calypso chipset interfaces.

s/all/most/

Exposing every Calypso GPIO plus all of the memory bus lines plus all
Iota chip analog signals would have been a lot more work in terms of
PCB layout, and PCB layout labor is not cheap.  But all of the most
important and practically interesting interfaces are brought out.

> If you come from the consumer side and "just want" a free firmware, then FC
> has no value for you, there is nothing new and exciting in there.

To be pedantic, there *is* one existing "consumer" device (if you can
call it that) for which FreeCalypso does offer a free replacement for
the original proprietary fw.  That pre-existing device is the Neo
FreeRunner by Openmoko: so far our FC firmware updates for the FR have
been more along the lines of bugfixes without a whole lot of freedom
increase, but when our TCS2/TCS3 hybrid firmware gets more mature and
becomes usable as a replacement for the TCS211 blob version of G23M,
we will have a firmware update for the FreeRunner that changes a major
component from blobs to source which you can study and improve.

Of course Openmoko devices are ridden with other problems that make
the previous paragraph mostly academic: they are no longer made, one
can no longer buy them NOS because that supply has been exhausted, and
even those of who do have those phones have a difficult time actually
using them because the OM community has disintegrated without having
produced rock solid application software for end users.

As one of the more distant and nebulous goals of FC I would like to
produce a new end user phone that could take the place of Openmoko
devices, whether it be a modified version of something like Neo900
(modified to replace their proprietary modem with my proposed FCM01)
or a Libre Dumbphone with the Calypso as the main and sole processor
of the phone, but that goal is currently *very* distant and nebulous -
in the near term I am focusing on modem products with commercial
potential.

M~