[ILUG] Android gone Free

[John P. Looney]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 6:00 PM, Paul Jakma <paul at jakma.org> wrote:

> Though there are two types of radio driver source. One is the stuff that is
>> open sourced for the G1. This is the bit that talks to the baseband chip,
>> wifi, bluetooth etc. The second is for the software running on the baseband
>> chip itself; this is closed-source by law in most places, as no normal
>> country will licence a device that any user can use to jam mobile signals
>> etc. by just reprogramming power levels etc.
>>
>
> Just out of curiosity, any cites for these claims?
>

 I went poking. It seems that there is no official citation, and the FCC
have explicitly said it's not true that there are any legal obstacles in the
US. A number of people working in the industry have heard it trotted out as
an excuse when they went looking for source to such drivers previously
though. So it's possible that some day, some radio chipset maker will open
source their firmware. Interesting that Qualcomm joined the
OHA<http://www.qualcomm.com/innovation/stories/android.html>but
haven't actually opened their code for the G1 - as far as I can tell
its
not in the Android Git repository.

 I assume that OpenMoko's baseband chipset has opensourced firmware...which
would kinda prove the point.

John