On Thu, 10 Jul 2008, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
An interesting (to me) discussion, probably not for this list, would be exactly how open a cell phone could be and still get regulatory approval. Geoff.
I can answer that. I hinted at it in my previous email. The guideline we followed was RMS's rule about when source code has to be delivered. If code running on a chip or set of chips can not be downloaded or updated or reprogrammed in any convenient way by the user (which in this context includes you, the open source developer), then for practical purposes it may be considered to be hardware, and thus source code is not required. (I like to think of this as similar to the Turing Test - if you can not determine from the outside whether it's implemented completely in hardware, or whether it consists of some form of firmware, then we call it hardware.) The GSM radio in Openmoko's Neo Freerunner is a black box. The interface is well defined (it's a serial port and implements the industry-standard cellphones extensions to the AT smart modem command set) and all code that communicates with the black box is open. Anything inside the black box can not be modified by developers, and thus received regulatory approval. Michael ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
