FOSS, Science, and Public activism
A message that is not in the archive (sent off-list or not yet received): [email protected]
Greetings,
Quoted 10 lines · On 7/2/06, [email protected] <[email protected]> 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
Quoted 13 lines · Paul Schulz
Greetings,
Quoted 10 lines · On 7/2/06, [email protected] <[email protected]> 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.
Signature · 1 line
dwmw2
Quoted 6 lines · Paul Schulz
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.