Some of you may have been following the OLPC discussion. Here is
one place you can read more about it:
http://www.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/286/
Finally it has been made more clear what this is about. The
discussion is being discussed at a variety of other sites.
However, a problem remains -- Jim Gettys at Red Hat keeps
mis-representing what it is that we (OpenBSD, but also the developer
community at large) want from Marvell. He tries to make us look
unreasonable by attributing unreasonable viewpoints to us.
He says that what we ask for is "firmware source code". Other times
he says we ask for "enough documentation to write a firmware". We
never asked for those things, and we never expect to get them. Both
of those are things which Marvell is very unlikely to give up. By
mis-representing our views as such, he hopes to make them look
unreasonable.
>From the start we have been clear about what we need from Marvell (or
any other vendor). We need rights to distribute firmware binaries,
plus enough documentation to allow the creation & maintainance of a
kernel-level driver to interface with the card. We do not wish to
become firmware authors. The Marvell 802.11 chip is just one of 30
similar products on the market, and thus we wish to spend as little
time working on it as possible.
What we ask for is a small subset of the documentation that Marvell
has produced for their customers. It details how the firmware is
loaded onto the ARM cpu, and then the protocol one talks to the
firmware.
Jim keeps saying we are being unreasonable, and to do so, he creates
unreasonable viewpoints for us.
OLPC says they need the firmware programming information so they can
write their own mesh implimentation. Fine. So they signed an NDA.
Fine. But when they signed that NDA they made it even harder for us
to get the information we so reasonably have said we need. That was
my point from the beginning. When they signed that NDA, they seriousl
hurt the device driver developer community, because they had not
insisted on the subset of rights that developers need.
Since Jim repeatedly mistates our views, I am making the controversial
move of publishing the entire email archive.
It is in a flat file at
http://www.theos.com/deraadt/jg
Jim always makes sure that everything he writes mentions the children.
But I must make sure that you also think of the device driver
programmers.
