Re: [Sfd] FOSS, Science, and Public activism

Re: [Sfd] FOSS, Science, and Public activism

[Paul Schulz]

Greetings,

On 7/2/06, proclus@gnu-darwin.org <proclus@gnu-darwin.org> wrote:
> It is important to alert the whole FOSS community that Darwin
> cannot be classified as a free or open source operation system
> as of the Darwin-8 revision, because AppleACPIplatform-39 which
> is required to boot the system is proprietary.  It is notable that
> only the current version of Darwin from Apple is a non-free OS.
> GNU-Darwin has a free version, an earlier revision that includes
> the source code.  It is FOSS, and we call upon Apple to maintain
> Darwin as such, as it has been in the past.  We hope that the
> current situation with the kernel and ACPI driver will soon be
> remedied so that Darwin will continue as a FOSS OS.

On a 'smaller' related note.. the ArmCore modules that are made by
Compulab (compulab.co.il) use a proprietory bootloader (ARMMon) for
their Intel Xscale,
system on a chip.

Rather than make use of the mtd drivers for Linux (for whatever reason), they
ship their own binary flash modules for Linux. This is used by both
the bootloader
and the modified linux kernel. This makes is (nearly) impossible to look into
various hardware  related issues on this platform eg.
  - reducing boot time of the Linux kernel
  - evaluating other flash drivers
  - using alternative OS's (L4/pistachio) and
  - running safety critical code directly 'on the metal'.

A nice clean FOSS based counter-example are the GunStix Waysmall systems
(same architecture) built by http://www.gumstix.com.

Regards,
Paul Schulz

Re: [Sfd] FOSS, Science, and Public activism

[David Woodhouse]

On Fri, 2006-09-08 at 08:03 +0930, Paul Schulz wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> On 7/2/06, proclus@gnu-darwin.org <proclus@gnu-darwin.org> wrote:
> > It is important to alert the whole FOSS community that Darwin
> > cannot be classified as a free or open source operation system
> > as of the Darwin-8 revision, because AppleACPIplatform-39 which
> > is required to boot the system is proprietary.  It is notable that
> > only the current version of Darwin from Apple is a non-free OS.
> > GNU-Darwin has a free version, an earlier revision that includes
> > the source code.  It is FOSS, and we call upon Apple to maintain
> > Darwin as such, as it has been in the past.  We hope that the
> > current situation with the kernel and ACPI driver will soon be
> > remedied so that Darwin will continue as a FOSS OS.

If it's only ACPI, does it really matter? ACPI exists mostly for the
same reason as proprietary kernel modules -- to allow manufacturers to
obscure the details of the hardware.

Instead of having a free interpreter which runs their proprietary
bytecode in kernel mode, you have a closed interpreter which runs their
proprietary bytecode in kernel mode.

I would argue that even if your interpreter was open source, once you
submitted to using ACPI you'd already lost the Free Software game.

-- 
dwmw2

Re: [Sfd] FOSS, Science, and Public activism

[Justin Clacherty]

Paul Schulz wrote:
> Rather than make use of the mtd drivers for Linux (for whatever reason), they
> ship their own binary flash modules for Linux. This is used by both
> the bootloader
> and the modified linux kernel. This makes is (nearly) impossible to look into
> various hardware  related issues on this platform eg.
>   
Had some problems with this myself.  The proprietary boot loader is 
annoying...

I believe they've open sourced the mtd driver now in this "[PATCH 04/06] 
CM-x2xx: MTD" patch to the arm-linux list.

Justin.