Re: Official support Odroid hardware and other ARM development boards.
Am Mittwoch, den 26.02.2014, 18:26 -0700 schrieb Eric Nelson:
> Hi Luke,
>
> On 02/26/2014 05:44 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> > On Wed,
> Ahem.... You can run our boards with 100% open source, and I think
> our quad-core GHz i.MX6
>
> There's one key piece that's normally closed-source (the GPU), but
> there's an open-source alternative here:
> https://github.com/laanwj/etna_viv
>
> There are also some open-source bits with licenses other than
> GPL/LGPL provided by Freescale (notably, some of the VPU code),
> but the restrictions are pretty reasonable: Don't use on non-Freescale
> processors...
If you need that code to run the board, well, than also your boards are
non-free, if you refer to the DFSG.
> > oh you do... they're just shit compared to the "latest and greatest",
> > because you have to go back about.... 2 to 5 years in technology terms
> > to get them. which means they're either useless, or expensive, or
> > both. take the latest software for example: you simply can't run
> > libreoffice or firefox in under 512mb of RAM nowadays. or at less
> > than a 1ghz processor speed.
> >
> > the manufacturers of successful products just *do not* wish to work
> > with software libre individuals. sure they're prepared to take
> > whatever they've created "for free" and say "thank you very much, fuck
> > off now, BYE sucker, we'll fuck you over for the next revision you
> > release as well har har that's what you get when you release code with
> > such a lame license that doesn't need us to pay you any money har
> > har"... you get the drift.
> >
>
> Again, ahem... We try very hard to give back when we can.
Well, *trying* does not say *eventually*. (Sorry, no offense meant, but
I've heard that excuse too often)
> Essentially everything we provide is open-source, although we do
> ship closed-source binaries (for the GPU) as well.
>
> > but, working from the ground up is the only way that this situation
> > is going to change. The Plan:
> >
> > 1) make some successful desirable mass-volume hardware that respects
> > software freedom
> > 2) sell lots of it
> > 3) put the money made back into funding software libre
> > 4) put the rest back into solving a non-free issue whilst not
> > compromising the profitability needed for the next iteration round the
> > loop
> > 5) repeat from 1.
> >
>
> I don't know what you consider "lots", and we don't put **all** of
> our money back into free software, but we do spend time and money
> on various open-source projects, so I'll take some exception to the
> brush you've used to paint us "greedy manufacturers"...
>
> > if !do above, expect current situation (support for ARM hardware in
> > GNU/Linux distros) to remain very very low. other methods aren't
> > working out.
> >
>
> We'd love to have an "easy button" for folks wanting to use our
> boards with Debian.
IMHO, make it /completly) dfsg free (to be able to be in main) would be
the first step and for sure there will some interest... Of course, you
might have to invest some time, provide patches, docs, guidelines, talk
to the kernel people to get your board supported, etc...
I understand that in a world with patents and NDAa this might be hard,
but -- taking the Pi as bad example -- having everything required to
simply boot to be open source to *boot* would be a starting point,
(/me for example don't care about gfx on my embedded boards, I use them
as a headless server... But if you want a broad audience, gfx is for
sure required later)
> The best routes at the moment are Robert Nelson's eewiki:
> http://eewiki.net/display/linuxonarm/i.MX6x+SABRE+Lite
> And our home-brew notes:
> http://boundarydevices.com/tag/debian/
>
> Has anyone given thought to a Debian "porting" group funded
> by manufacturers for "official" Debian support?
>
> We'd be interested in something like that, both out of self-interest
> and also to help the community...
>
> Regards,
>
>
> Eric Nelson
> Boundary Devices
>
>
--
coldtobi
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