Flashing

[Mychaela Falconia]

> It is unrealistic to expect everyone to go back 15y ago phone-wise, I
> respect it that you do but "smart" phones are a thing now and smartphone
> users should demand free basebands and further generation G's to be free
> so this isn't a problem.

I cannot give you "further generation G's" (far beyond my capabilities),
but I *can* give you a free GSM/2G baseband module which you can then
incorporate as a component into whatever kind of smartphone you wish
to design and build.  However, it would cost about 30 kUSD to produce,
and I have a dedicated web page for this idea:

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

> So in your eyes is the gta02 proprietary because you can't do those things
> on it?

No, it is not proprietary, instead it is simply not practically usable
for me.  A phone has to be practically usable first and foremost;
various degrees of free vs. proprietary matter only *after* the
usability threshold has been passed, which OM fails for me.

Of course one could argue that practical usability is a relative
concept too - after all our dear community member David did use his
GTA02 as his daily phone for a good while.  But in my case, if I tried
to use QtMoko like David did, it would cause me more pain and grief
than the proprietary aspects of the Pirelli DP-L10 do currently.

> Is something proprietary if it's compiled using binary-only compiler even
> if it's released as free software?

I leave the philosophical question for you to decide.  We do have
FC Selenite firmware which can be compiled with gcc instead of TI's
proprietary compiler, but it is experimental, not production quality.
Doing the very massive amount of work to bring it to production
quality is something I would be willing to do only if someone pays me
to do it.

> Is there any IP left in OM's last release which wasn't published by you?

No, there isn't.

> That's the thing with Guix, they compile directly from source, no
> traditional package maintainers needed. See here for fc-host-tools:
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/embedded.scm#n978

Yes, I have looked at it, and they are applying changes which I
disapprove of.  I vehemently object to the FreeCalypso tools tree
being moved anywhere other than the official /opt/freecalypso
location.

> It is unrealistic to expect everyone to go back 25y ago distro-wise and
> compile everything from source, I respect it that you do but distro
> packagers are a thing now and distro users should demand a single package
> solution across all distros so fragmentation isn't a problem. Guix is the
> closest solution we have right now.

You don't have to agree with my philosophy, but if you choose to do
things I disapprove of, I am not under obligation to support you, as
you are not paying me for commercial support.

M~