[Arm-netbook] Side-Topic: Liberating PocketCHIP

[doark at mail.com]

On Tue, 30 May 2017 03:27:19 +0100
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:
> On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 10:37 PM, David Niklas <doark at mail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Prior to purchasing the Pocket CHIP I read their docs and kickstarter
> > page. See this (their kickstarter page says similar):
> > https://docs.getchip.com/chip.html#is-chip-open-source-where-are-the-docs
> > Are they flat out lying?  
> 
>  absolutely not.  absolutely everything (with the exception of MALI)
> has been available for the A13 core for... like... 4 years.
The wifi requires a binary blob according to this thread (unless I'm
remembering wrongly).

>  getting
> this through to people's thick skulls, thanks to the high
> noise-to-signal ratio, is getting frankly a little tiresome, i don't
> mind admitting.
> 
> l.

Well, when you say "opensource hardware" most people, including myself,
think "Oh, a completely opensource down to the last transistor
machine!!!"
When i first read the slashdot page on the C.H.I.P. I really thought that
that is what they meant... Same story with eoma. Which only makes sense,
since, taking spamassasin as an example, if you get an "opensource"
program you expect not only every line available for viewing but also the
docs and mass-check rules to be "opensource", which they are.

No offence intended luke, but when I see people trying to "Opensource"
something I am often times disappointed. I know that you and others work
very hard but it looks, to me, to be a half done job almost all the time
and I mean with software too, because it tends to lack tests to verify
it's functionality and docs to train the coming generations, myself
numbering among them.


Thanks,
David