Legal situation

[Serg l]

Michaela,
Thank you for detailing this. I think we need to bookmark this and refer
everybody who needs to understand what it is all about.

On Sep 10, 2017 1:33 PM, "Mychaela Falconia" <mychaela.falconia at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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~
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