Liberated Calypso docs found

Michael Sokolov msokolov at ivan.Harhan.ORG
Tue Sep 27 08:37:44 CEST 2011


Sebastian Krzyszkowiak <dos at dosowisko.net> wrote:

> Calypso wasn't brought by Openmoko Inc. as company. Previously it was
> part of bigger company, FIC - I guess that's why they got it. It was
> much later when Openmoko Inc. was splitted into another, standalone
> company.

OK, that's fine.  In that regard FIC can be viewed no different from
Motorola, Nokia or any other large bourgeois company that made phones
based on TI's Calypso/Iota/Rita chipset.  However, in order to make this
chipset work in the GTA0[12] configuration, the Calypso firmware had to
be modified in an application-specific way.  Corporate bureaucrats and
lawyers are not capable of making such code modifications themselves.
Therefore, they must have had at least one qualified embedded system
sw/fw engineer who was given access to that secret source code for the
purpose of making the necessary code modifications.  Unless they were
super-paranoid about the security of their NDA and were distrustful of
their own employees (unless you are dealing with gov/mil secrets or
somesuch, in my experience it's pretty rare for companies to be so tight
within their own walls), such access to Calypso fw source code was
probably given to more than one of their engineers, more likely to all
of them or at least a significant subset.

I assume that whoever worked on Calypso firmware for GTA0[12] phones
back at Openmoko/FIC is no longer employed by that company: my natural
guess is that the phone engineers were probably let go when the phone
business got shut down, and even if not, people move to new jobs and
companies all the time for all kinds of reasons.  I would have a hard
time accepting a notion that not one of Openmoko's engineers has taken a
personal copy of the secret source code home with him/her on a USB
stick.  (I for one have no problem admitting quite openly that I have
kept personal copies of most of the interesting bits from most of my
past employers.  And the only reason some of them aren't on my FTP site
yet is because they are huge.  I'm working on setting up a new FTP
server with bigger disks.)

So to those one or two ex-Openmoko employees who have a copy of the
Calypso fw source stashed away on a personal hard drive somewhere, but
who are not admitting to that and not sharing the ware: what is stopping
you from sharing?  Why are you being Bad Guys by withholding highly
valuable material from Humanity?  Can't be for fear of being fired,
assuming that you are no longer employed by Openmoko/FIC.  Can't be for
fear of being sued, as that is just not realistic.

Gennady Kupava <gb at bsdmn.com> wrote:

> It might be good idea to keep political/religional/race difference and
> concentrate on techinical aspects.

Yup, technical aspects such as the Calypso chipset and its firmware.
Before we can start improving the latter, we need to obtain a copy of
whatever at least partially modifiable source the Openmoko company had.

I'll plow through that Chinese mobile phone forum site some more when I
get more time to work on it.

MS



More information about the community mailing list