AGPS closed source drivers = DRM for public data

[Marcus Bauer]

On Wed, 2006-12-27 at 14:14 +0100, Gabriel Ambuehl wrote:

> Considering that we have an userland application that drives the chip, 
> shouldn't it be relatively straight forward to reverse engineer the protocol? 

That takes time and with every new version of the phone the game starts
all over. Closed source driver have always been a pain on Linux and
still are.

> But of course it would be better if Global Locate would simply provide it...

Global Locate is certainly afraid of patent infringement. The market
leader SiRF holds lots of patents around gps chipsets and regularly sues
other chipmakers. And just by chance it happens that they sued Global
Locate the other day. On the 18th of December to be exact.

Most likely this battle will be settled by Global Locate paying license
fees to SiRF. Global Locate should just make sure that the deal includes
the communication/protocol with the chip. But the will only do so if the
market demands for that.

As FIC is planning to buy 100.000 of the chips per month they have
enough buying power to communicate to GL that open specs are indeed a
selling point.

As the open source community supports FIC, so can do FIC in return. We
just need to push them a little bit.



Marcus