[qcc] TODO?

[Rob Landley]

On 10/21/2015 11:33 AM, Рысь wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Oct 2015 13:39:58 +0000
> Sean Lynch <seanl at literati.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Oct 21, 2015, 04:20 Рысь <lynx at sibserver.ru> wrote:
>>
>> You're talking about android like it's The Only Future and we can't
>> escape. I wonder why such a hype to a corporation-influenced binary
>> OS.
>>
>> Rob is talking about extracting open-source code from an open-source
>> distribution of Android. So "binary" is false. And
>> "corporation-influenced" is an ad hominem attack. You have the code.
>> Call out what you don't like in the code and point to some thing
>> better that's not "corporation-influenced."
>>
>> I work for Google, but I have no particular love of Android; my only
>> particular interest in it is that it runs on small devices. I run
>> Cyanogenmod on my Nexus 7. I use F-Droid on my corporate phone to
>> install open source alternatives whenever I can.
>>
>> My biggest gripe is against the Play store. It has convinced
>> potential and past open source developers that they can get rich on
>> their, when most of the time they'll get a pittance while the
>> community loses far more value through the closing of their code. And
>> more often, they keep it closed just to put ads in it, though many of
>> the projects in F-Droid are open source apps that have ads in their
>> Play Store version. That I can live with; if you are too dumb to
>> install F-Droid you can live with the ads.
>>
>> The worst thing is that AdMob is one of the products I support. I am
>> an SRE so I keep it running rather than adding features to it, but
>> still. I do complain about it a lot though.
>>
>> I wish the Play Store had a way to search for open source projects.
>> Even searching for "open source" turns up mostly closed source apps.
>> Which reminds me, I need to submit that as a feature request.
> 
> The wrong thing is thinking about closed and forced platform as "open
> source".

No, it's built using many open source components.

> Can you open source average chinese phone? Or non-google one
> like HTC or other big vendor? They all come with closed, binary parts
> you'll not receive code for. Never.

Meh, reverse engineering binaries is trivial for people like Melissa
Elliott of Veracode. It's their day job. We got the nouveau and
forcedeth drivers not by beating specs out of the manufacturer, but by
reverse engineering binaries.

The most popular android chipset is the qualcomm snapdragon. The
"graphics coprocessor" in that is the QDSP6, also known as the Hexagon.
I helped port Linux to the hexagon for Qualcomm in 2010, thus I know
that the Code Aurora hexagon toolchains contain an "objdump -d" that
will disassemble the binary blob in those things into a documented
instruction set. :)

(The baseband processor is a pair of processors, the boot processor is a
low-end armv5l chip and the other baseband processor is a qdsp4, a
predecessor to qdsp6 with a similar instruction set. I haven't tried
disassembling the baseband firmware with the hexagon toolchain because I
have other stuff to do, but I expect there are qdsp4 toolchains on code
aurora too. They provide these so people can program their chips.)

> And they prevail. That's the
> characteristic for that platform. It has something "spheric", aside,
> that AOSP thingy which nobody bothers to follow.

You _really_ don't go to the right conferences. ELC had like 5
presentations on that this spring alone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUOzBvtXEgE

Kharim gave a whole tutorial series last year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaI2upEFuoc

> Everyone preload their
> devices with binary crap.

A sales model that bundles phones with data service plans is a bit of an
issue, yes. Here in the US T-mobile lets you buy devices and plans
separately, which is nice, and which is why companies like AT&T keep
trying to buy them and stop them. (And getting shot down by what remains
of our antitrust regulators.)

However, this kind of crappy bundling is _not_ the norm in places like
India. A billion people _not_ strangled by out of control IP laws are
likely to be more interesting than 350 million people legislated into a
box by the Toilet Paper Treaty.

(I've long said "dying business models explode into a cloud of
intellectual property litigtation", I'm starting to suspect dying
_societies_ do the same thing; the US is looking a bit too much like the
latter stages of the roman empire for my tastes, I _hope_ that's just
aging baby boomers working their way through the national large
intestine and will go away when they do.)

> Chinese even violate GPL, but nobody sue them and never will.

China has never paid more than lip service to anybody's IP laws. Just
like the US ignored european copyrights for the first hundred and
something years of the country when we went from a third world rounding
error to our civil war being the largest war ever fought up to that
point in history despite the fact we fielded both sides of it.

It turns out intellectual property laws are bad for intellectual
property. A country that doesn't have/enforce them will technologically
kick the ass of a country that does. Every time. That's part of the
reason we're trying to tie down the rest of the world into our royalty
regimes, because otherwise we're a paralyzed bureaucracy of royal
patronage grants going rapidly obsolete.

> This also
> proves that GPL does not work and question is much broader than anyone
> can imagine.

Yes the GPL does not work. I gave an entire TALK about how the GPL does
not work:

http://landley.net/talks/ohio-2013.txt

(Link to mp3 at the start, and I really need to redo that one because I
covered _maybe_ 1/3 of my material.)

> The PC was nice platform. It still remains. It is somehow standartized.

Um, not "somehow". We know exactly how it happened. Did I mention
computer history is a hobby of mine?

http://landley.net/history/mirror

> The binary is only BIOS. That all droids remind me cheap embedded
> routers. They are embedded, fragmented and anyone make their own. They
> are no going to REPLACE PC (which Rob tries to predict).

I hate to break it to you: they already _did_.

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/death-pc-not-greatly-exaggerated/
http://www.businessinsider.com/pc-sales-plummet-in-q2-2015-gartner-idc-say-2015-7?r=UK&IR=T

PC sales have gone down each quarter for 14 consecutive quarters.

> There is
> nothing to replace. I can't imagine spelling errors going from tablets
> and phones will soon prevail. I can't imagine true development ON
> android.

I can. That's why I'm trying to make android self-hosting out of the box.

> Photos and videos all you need? They're still toys, not
> something bigger.

You're aware this is _exactly_ the objection Unix Vax admins had to the
PC up through, oh, Dec going out of business and its corpse being bought
by Compaq in 1996?

> Old steam-powered PCs will go away, sure. I don't resist in any way.
> But letting these toys replace them is sure downgrading.

They'll take your big iron from your cold dead fingers once they pry the
punch cards out of it, yes.

> And don't worry about ads. iptables serves me well.

Orthogonal.

Rob

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