Legal situation

[Mychaela Falconia]

One other problem I have with what this "viva astoria" person is saying
is the following:

> Then I have the following impression and question: it seems to me that the
> newly developed firmware is neither [one quality] nor [another quality]
> than the original TI firmware?

The fundamental fallacy in this person's choice of wording is that
they seem to think that one could somehow choose between running
either "the original TI firmware" or FreeCalypso on the same hardware,
and questioning how the latter is better than the former.  But the
fundamental flaw in this person's understanding of the situation is
that there is NO "original TI fw" which one could actually run on any
actually available hardware as an alternative to our FreeCalypso
firmwares.

We never got any firmware (source or otherwise) directly from TI, and
we don't have any fw (again, source or otherwise) that directly
corresponds to TI's internal mainline.  Instead what we have is a
Prometheus-liberated copy of a firmware which TI delivered to a
*specific downstream customer* (call it Company 1), and we did not
even get what TI gave to Company 1 in a pristine form, instead what we
got was that plus Company 1's own local modifications.  Those
Company 1 modifications were either adaptations to C1's specific
hardware quirks which are not applicable to our different FreeCalypso
hardware, or just plain bugs introduced by Company 1's sw engineers
who had no clue what they were doing.  We had to find and remove the
latter deleterious Company 1 modifications, identify the bits specific
to their hardware and conditionalize them so they get included only
when we build our fw to run on the scarce historical hardware from
that Company 1, and introduce some new (appropriately conditionalized)
hardware-specific quirks of our own for targeting our own FC hw.

If you wish to run "the original TI firmware" instead of FreeCalypso,
the only way you might be able to do so would be if you manage to find
an original TI-made D-Sample or Leonardo board (not easy: in my many
years of searching I have scored one D-Sample board, but never found a
Leonardo) and run whatever fw that board already comes flashed with.
If you change TI to Company 1 (anyone with half a clue can figure out
what that company is), you might be able to find some of their hw (no
longer made for many years and not available NOS any more either), and
you could run their original fw instead of FreeCalypso if you like -
but then you would simply be running an older fw version that still
has some bugs that were fixed in our newer FreeCalypso fw versions.

But if you are not a lucky owner of an original TI-made D-Sample or
Leonardo board and you are not interested in heavily used (not NOS)
hardware from Company 1 in beat-up condition, then the only newly made
hardware you can get with the Calypso chipset is our FCDEV3B - see my
post from less than 48 hours ago announcing the availability of these
boards.  And when you do use the hardware made by us rather than some
other company, then the only TI-based firmware available for our hw is
our own FreeCalypso fw, of which we have 3 different versions:
Magnetite l1reconst, Magnetite hybrid and Citrine.

Of course if you do buy one of our FCDEV3B boards, no one forces you
to use our FreeCalypso fw: you could simply ignore the FreeCalypso fw
image in the flash and run OsmocomBB software instead (which only runs
a teensy-tiny piece of code on the Calypso itself and feeds it to the
Calypso boot ROM serially, hence there is nothing to flash), but then
you won't be able to take advantage of the per-unit RF calibration
performed on our factory production line.  We calibrate the Tx power
levels on each board with an external measuring instrument (R&S CMU200)
and save these per-unit calibration values in the flash file system,
so if you use our official FreeCalypso fw (any of our 3 versions), the
Tx power levels put out by our modem meet the official specs.  But
OsmocomBB does not know how to read these RF calibration tables in
TI's format and uses a hard-coded table instead - according to
OsmocomBB head honcho Harald Welte, the latter table is only good for
some particular Mot C1xx phone, and thus stands no chance of being
correct for our FCDEV3B with different RF hardware, thus if you use
OsmocomBB, your Tx power levels will most certainly be out of spec.

M~