FreeCalypso hardware update

[Serg l]

I'm not a lawyer and this might be not be entirely correct, so here are
some ideas for discussion.

1. Copyrighted materials have no "expiration date", so rights could be
enforced by legal owner, which could be not the original author of the
materials.
2. There is a concept of abandonware, which is not really recognized by the
letter of law, however it is being practiced when owner does not exists or
decides not to enforce the the infringement
3. Fair use concept could be exercised to study materials and make some
limited not-for-profit use. As long as there is no product offered on the
market the infringement could be protected by fair use clause. The
abandoned materials were found in public domain by negligence of another
party and is being studied now, so TI will have no case at this time if
they come forward. Even if a limited number of FC boards will be made, it
is still all experimental stuff.
4. There is a good chance that TI will not come forward and demand
anything, however the easy way to protect would be registering LLC and
acting from the name of that entity, rather than an individual. In this
case it would be possible just close the shop and walk away, at least as
things stand today. There is another complication here, the codebase
contains components which were licensed to TI by other parties, so we are
looking at obtaining multiple releases, which could be difficult.
5. It would be highly desirable to rewrite entire codebase using existing
sources as a reference implementation. This is completely legal and I would
seek support from OSS community, especially for an effort to replace the
RTOS. I think OsmocomBB chose that path, except that they did not make the
reference implementation publicly available. I think this comes from a fear
that people will start copy/paste significant amount of original code into
Osmocom repos, jeopardizing the whole Osmocom effort.

Again, this is just for discussion. It could be a good idea to have a
hangouts or other teleconference session to discuss this, especially if
some more knowledgeable in the legal aspects can speak out. Declaring all
this effort as illegal activity is easy, as it was done by some folks here,
and not appreciated, finding a solution, even if it takes an effort and
resources is what this community needs.


On Sun, Oct 7, 2018 at 1:29 PM Mychaela Falconia <
mychaela.falconia at gmail.com> wrote:

> Josh wrote:
>
> > TY for writing the letter Mychaela, takes some guts; V. appreciative,
> > you are a credit to the Free Software community.
>
> Are you talking about the letter I sent to TI near the end of August?
> Here is what I sent them:
>
> https://www.freecalypso.org/members/falcon/TI-outreach/letter-20180826.pdf
>
> It has been over a month, almost a month and a half, and I never heard
> anything back.  For those who are concerned about the potentially
> TI-copyright-violating status of our firmware, what would you like to
> see as the next step?
>
> M~
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