[Community] FOSDEM 2015

[Paul Kocialkowski]

> >> ²>> the main entrance but inside from about 11:45 to 12:00 holding in 
> >>>> front of
> >>>> me a sign with the OpenPhoenux logo.
> >>> 
> >>> I'll be there, and I guess Paul will read this as well. I'll wear my
> >>> phone around my neck for identification.
> >> 
> >> Sure, count me in as well!
> > 
> > I waited for about half an hour at the indicated location, with Christ
> > who had to leave at some point. Eventually, I gave up and grabbed lunch
> > on my own.
> > 
> > Thankfully, we were able to chat a bit after my talk!
> 
> sorry that I could not visit FOSDEM this year and did miss your talk.
> But I am curious how it was.
> 
> And how the FOSDEM generally was. Anything interesting to share
> with our community?

As usual, FOSDEM was a nice event to be a part of! However, it is a bit
sad that the people working on creating embedded devices that truly push
free software to the next level were under-represented this year.
In particular, I'm thinking about the OpenPhoenux community (Goldelico
with the GTA04, Neo900) as well as the DragonBox Pyra, Novena and all
the board makers that use Allwinner, i.MX, OMAP chips. Thus, I felt that
the discussions around the embedded devroom were not very
freedom-oriented. Overall, I had a feeling that talking about freedom
and the core values of why we're doing all this is going away, which is
sad because it didn't feel the same last year.

This is only true in part, because I had very interesting discussions
with graphics people who truly believe this is the right way to go, so
that was refreshing.

We also discussed a bit how to get more support from companies and there
is a lot to say there because obviously, not every company out there
acts like TI by providing extensive documentation and direct support
form their engineers to the community. Tsvetan from Olimex talked about
his experience with Allwinner during the round table fill-in session we
had during John Sullivan's slot (his talk had been cancelled).

The point was that most of those companies (especially the Asian ones)
don't care about free software (and often neglect most of the legal
aspects of it). They are interested in making money before anything and
producing upstream quality code costs them a lot of money and doesn't
apparently bring any significant advantage. Apparently, only very big
companies like Intel, Samsung and others can afford to have people
dedicated to writing quality free software support for their hardware.
Even writing documentation to give free software developers has an
enormous cost.

Now there are different ways to react to that (which is exactly what the
linux-sunxi community faced). I do agree with Luc Verhaegen's approach
of complaining as loudly as possible when the chip maker does not
release the source code it has to release (e.g. kernel bits) under the
GPL terms. Such violations do not require any more code to be written,
just will for the company to release them, so I do agree that pressuring
them to release those bits is the only reasonable thing to do. This is
an attack towards our community and there is no reason to be kind of
quiet about it.

Now when it comes to getting the company to take part in the community,
there are different approaches that could make it work and I'm not sure
which is best. Apparently in the graphics area, customers pressuring the
PR department combined with the fact that competitors are doing it too
can give some results (at least, it's starting to work with nVidia).

For instance, Imagination Technologies (PowerVR maker) is now selling
their MIPS CI-20 single board computer that has a PowerVR series 5 chip
which requires proprietary software for graphics acceleration and 3D.
Since Img Tech is selling that board directly, there is a direct
customer relation with us so we can pressure their public relationships
department to ask for change (the guy's name is Alexandru Voica). So
please, if you feel like getting one of those CI-20 boards (they're
actually not so bad for software freedom, see:
https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers) and complain to
Img Tech afterwards for the lack of free graphics support, please do
(they're actually pretty cheap too)!

-- 
Paul Kocialkowski, Replicant developer

Replicant is a fully free Android distribution running on several
devices, a free software mobile operating system putting the emphasis on
freedom and privacy/security.

Website: http://www.replicant.us/
Blog: http://blog.replicant.us/
Wiki/tracker/forums: http://redmine.replicant.us/

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