XO-2

[Alex Belits]

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:

> I believe item k) was already in the contracts with Quanta and Marvell,
> unless the official announcements back then were wrong. It has been
> stated repeatedly by OLPC officials that the only thing preventing a
> full open source wireless firmware is the lack of time for porting the
> code to another embedded OS.

What?

I am still trying to find out, whom am I supposed to ask at Marvell to 
give the documentation and/or pieces of whatever source Marvell can 
release (in whatever shape) to me and other volunteers interested in 
work on wireless firmware, so we can make an open source version of 
libertas firmware. It looks like everyone is discouraged to even hope 
for it at this point.

If Marvell people actually said that the only reason is lack of 
resources on their side, there are non-Marvell people willing to do 
that. All Marvell has to do is to release whatever materials they can 
release -- some even under NDA as long as it won't interfere open source 
software development. Marvell done that in the past with their other 
hardware, and there is no reason (other than "they are stealing our 
precioussss code" and "we are too embarrassed to show it to a 
professional programmer, he will laugh at us") not to do it this time.

The quoted paragraph almost makes it look that I should ask OLPC 
management so they can ask Marvell, however something tells me that this 
is the same kind of statement as "We added SD slot for Microsoft!" (in 
other words, outright lie).

-- 
Alex