On Wed, 2008-10-29 at 22:33 +0100, Michelle Konzack wrote: > > Anw what do you do with sourcode, for which there is not even a > compiler > availlable under Linux/BSD? And you HAV to buy a 8000 US$ > development > suit from the chip manufacturer to build the firmware?
Free software is an iterative process; we started with nothing, using proprietary C compilers, kernel, libc - everything. And we iterated, and iterated - now we have a free stack including BIOS, and are continuing to push freedom deeper down the stack. I feel for you that you are on the cutting edge, where you cannot do what you need to do without spending 8K US to buy a proprietary tool. > I have such software and EVEN me can not read the firmware. > > I have ONLY a "project" in my IDE and it produce the firmware. Well, your IDE is software, it can read the input settings to generate the firmware. So its part of the tool chain to build the firmware. Whatever data the IDE edits as you change settings, thats the source for the firmware. (You may be combining other binary blobs when you compile the firmware, but thats the nature of this part of the industry, as I understand it). And yes, people can fry their *own hardware* if they mess up the firmware. So what - I started with monitors you could completely fry if you put the wrong X11 config settings into it, which is vastly easier to do than rebuilding a firmware:). None of this changes the fundamental aspects though: - The output firmware is not the preferred form for modification (it is the output, not the alterable portion of the input). - The output firmware *may* need to be replaced if there is an issue found after the hardware ships. (Its not a write-once event to create firmware). This clearly means that we cannot ship it in main or contrib under the social contract. (I found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_hardware and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_intellectual_property_core useful reading, as I'm not personally coding down at this level). -Rob -- GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
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