Submitted by Jim Gettys from the OLPC team has responded in a long weblog to Theo de Raadt’s concerns over the use of the Marvell chip in the OLPC. Gettys explains why the Marvell chip was chosen and how the team is working on open wireless firmware.
Jim Gettys from the OLPC team has responded in a long weblog to Theo de Raadt’s concerns over the use of the Marvell chip in the OLPC. Gettys explains why the Marvell chip was chosen and how the team is working on open wireless firmware.
As usual, the critics of the OLPC project have been proven wrong. Not only are they succeeding, they are proving that some people just don’t understand the requirements behind this kind of project.
I for one look forward to children in developing nations being afforded the same opportunity I had growing up by being exposed to technology from an early age.
Edited 2006-10-07 18:03
You are right! I can’t wait till this happens! I don’t see any other group or companies that give a damn! There are some companies out there that have BILLIONS of dollars and could make something like this happen over night! But no!
So I am happy that this is moving forward! More power to OLPC!
“I for one look forward to children in developing nations being afforded the same opportunity I had growing up by being exposed to technology from an early age.”
I for one look forward to children in developing nations not having to worry about dying from starvation, prostituting themselves to survive and living on the street eating from other peoples garbage.
When those problems are no longer maybe we can start thinking about how to get these kids a computer.
Why do people keep thinking that these problems should be solved one at the time? Lots and lots of other organizations are tackling the food issue, so should people who wish to tackle the education aspect of the problem wait they are completely done?
For that matter what makes you think that the issues of, for example, child prostetution and education aren’t linked?
“Why do people keep thinking that these problems should be solved one at the time?”
Important problems should be solved before secondary and, in this case, tertiary ones. “Internet access” and “having a computer” isn’t a basic human need.
Last night I watched a documentary about how poor people live in this country (Philippines, in case you’re too lazy to look at my profile) and it goes pretty much like this:
You live under a low, heavily trafficed bridge about 1 meters above a river that reeks of raw sewage and bodily waste. Your “apartment” is a makeshift wood construction that will be washed away by the next flashflood and take you and your family with it. It is infested by roaches, rats and other vermin (we’re talking rats on your body while you sleep here) and it’s hot as a sauna. There’s no toilets so you do your thing in the river below your “apartment”. What little water you have is from an illegal connection to the water system and this water isn’t exactly clean. Since you cant afford to go to the doctor you and your family is constantly in bad health and even if you could go to a doctor you still couldn’t afford the medicine. Going to a dentist and maintaining proper dental hygiene is equally out of the question.
You are also unemployed and what little money you can make you get from scavenging garbage and waste in search for items to sell to junkshops. This will net you something like 1$ or 2$ per day. You are supposed to feed your family of 6 on this.
Oh yeah, and these people are relatively well off. They have a roof over their head.
So please tell me what a laptop is going to do for a kid in this situation? A laptop that, unless it is made from titanium and waterproof, is going to be broken pretty soon.
I’m sure this is all well meant and with good intentions (at least from some parties involved) but good intentions and wellmeaning isn’t going to make all your ideas magically good.
We’re not in Maine anymore, Toto.
“For that matter what makes you think that the issues of, for example, child prostetution and education aren’t linked?”
I’m sure they are linked in some ways but the OLPC laptop isn’t magically going to bring education to these kids.
Even if Theo were right (and he is not), this prove that for “Free Software” zealots their interests are before all, even those poor children, shame on you.
Edited 2006-10-07 18:29
Part of the point of the whole project is not just to make these capable, affordable machines available, but also to give them a platform to be able to learn on. Having closed up drivers will restrict the users freedom to learn from the machine and software in a programming and hardware interface level. It’s about giving them access to information, and it should be as open as possible. There are many technical hurdles they overcame in the design of the machine so to stop short at one part seemed odd to me. But it does seem now that they had taken these things into account and have a plan of action. I’m glad that sometime, hopefully soon, the users of these machines will be able to modify and tweak the drivers source code to their individual needs.
Im sorry, but that’s a lame excuse and I don’t buy it.
Poor children mean even more poor parents with very rare exception. Add to it traditonal old-people-hard-to-learn-new-stuff and you ( ok, not you, actually we) got even more long distance between children and parents. See, rich countries already dictate moral, life traditional, even learn all how you must emote! (MTV anyone ?). Parents and grandparents of that poor children cannot answer anything to rich countries informational pressure. So you going to increase that effect? Imagine, you western Europe and USA/canada contries all you children listen our russian TV, with endless Soviet Union folk people songs (from Baltic to Vladivistok), Russian graffity on everything, you chhildren all eat strange food with yellow stickers inside and there is no Disney or something – only stories about how cool to wear winter hat etc. (bad example, sorry, but i hope you got idea). Same time you national TV channels use outdated fuzzy look camera, no money for cool 3D movies and as result YOU CHILDREN DO NOT LIKE ANYTHING AMERICAN- STYLE. Noncence ? Even more, come to me, poor baby, I give you A GIFT – small cool Russian notebook. Ok, not all letters are Cyrillic, we are so gently that you can see menu in English (some main word at least). If you really want to help, not catch souls – please, grab less from that poor contries first. Stop stealing brains. Otherwise you look like old billioners that one hand make parents as slaves on farm and other hand spread cookies for free on holydays.
But main idea to make notebook small and cheap is very good, no doubt.
It just reminds me on SCO stories from before. They also tried to bash linux/redhat fom all sides. And since RH is the biggest name in linux distro bussines they are obvious target.
The difference is only that now ???BSD people bash linux from all sides possible. I guess it was OLPC turn now, since bringing up how big companies support linux and not BSD, how they lack money, after that it was the “we made ssh and everybody uses it”… Well, if anything it just moved me one step away from BSD again.
You really shouldn’t hold it against the BSD people: they really have accomplished a lot in terms of getting closed drivers opened. Unfortunately, Theo made idealized assumptions and accusations in this case.
Theo != “???BSD people”.
Theo is an abrasive person, nobody can really argue about that. I won’t speak to his motives, he may or may not have the “best interest” of humanity at heart – I don’t know. I do know, however, he generally irritates the heck out of people on BOTH sides of the camp (and people not even involved.) He is an idealist, and his view of the world seems very skewed in my eyes.
My whole point is – don’t base your judgement (so-to-speak) of the “???BSD people” on Theo. By far and large, the “???BSD people” very rarely get involved in linux bashing. I’ve seen a lot more bashing of the “???BSD people” coming from the linux camp – HOWEVER, I do not have a negative view of linux users or developers. I just have a negative view of the people who partake in the “bashing”. I also have an equally negative view of Theo. I suggest you don’t generalize and attempt to place blame where blame lies, not at an entire group of people who happened to have a few “bad apples” amongst them. EVERY group on earth (society itself) is no different. That does not make us all bad people!
Cheers,
David
The man ignored the whole point. Theo de Raadt is pissed off because the software developers signed a f–king NDA to get the driver made – noone said shitall about opening up an existing driver or about redistributing this hardware’s firmware. This was about a group of sellouts signing an NDA so that only a small number of people can do shit all with the codebase correctly. Jim Gettys’s ramblings are just that, they don’t answer the charge against them.
NDA or not, is open source and has a good cause, so you and Theo can just f–k off.
“””so you and Theo can just f–k off.”””
I agree. Theo and Janizary can just freck off.
The NDA *could* some day come back and bite the signers of the NDA. This is the risk that they are taking to give the rest of us an open driver, and to make the OLPC laptop possibble.
One has to admit that a project like this has some pretty severe constraints. Size, functionality, durability… not to mention… price. I’m sure that the reasons for choosing the Marvell chipset are compelling. I’d never have thought a $100 laptop with its feature-set was within the realm of possibility.
The OLPC guys are in the process of proving me wrong.
I’m not that familiar with Janizary. But Theo has a *long* track record of being an unreasonable hothead who makes his way into more news stories than he deserves to.
Edited 2006-10-09 00:12
“But Theo has a *long* track record of being an unreasonable hothead who makes his way into more news stories than he deserves to.”
Blah blah blah, Theo has a bad attitude, yada yada yada lets applaud this Getty guy even though he is not addressing the actual issue. You know, just because someone is “abrasive” it doesn’t mean they’re wrong.
Getty keeps talking about open firmware but *NO-ONE* has asked Marvell to open their firmware, not even the “abrasive” Theo. It’s not about the firmware, it’s about interfacing with the hardware and I have a really hard time believing that it would be such a hard task for Marvell to produce some docs.
It sure is no problem for many other hardware manufacturers.
And no, Marvell’s product isn’t unique, there are other wireless chipsets (both picoChip and TI has licensed from ARM) based on ARM that works pretty much the same way.
Oh yeah, and maybe you clever people can explain to me how code written under an NDA can truly be open source since, uh, you’re supposedly not allowed to disclose how it actually works.
Edited 2006-10-09 09:22
“””Oh yeah, and maybe you clever people can explain to me how code written under an NDA can truly be open source since, uh, you’re supposedly not allowed to disclose how it actually works.”””
Sheesh. You can download, from their GIT repo, the functional OSS driver they have developed. It says this very plainly in the article. This link is featured very plainly in the article.
But you didn’t read it before posting, did you?
http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=olpc-2.6;a=summary
The open firmware they are having written is still in development.
Let’s see. They signed an NDA. As a result, we are going to get an open-source driver. Distributable closed-source firmware. And eventually, open-source firmware. The Linux driver is probably enough for other operating system to write their own drivers. If not, maybe the open-source developers can help them out.
If they didn’t sign the NDA, guess what we would have. Nothing. Marvell probably wouldn’t release suitable documentation. They may not even have the documentation to release. Or it is so entangled with unneeded proprietary information that it can’t be released. We might get a proprietary driver or a reverse-engineered driver but they probably wouldn’t be sufficient for other operating systems to write drivers. We could hope that pressure would cause them to open up documentation. We can also hope for a pony.
Obviously you have not read the whole blog because you would not need to make this statement. Here is the details:
Marvell is not in a position to open their wireless firmware as it is currently dependent on the third party operating system kernel that they do not own. A GPL Linux device driver for the Marvell wireless chip, the Libertas driver, still under development but also fully functional can be found in our GIT tree.
We are having open firmware for the Marvell wireless chip developed by Meraki. I don’t know yet what license that code will be released under, though would expect it would likely be one or more of the MIT, LGPL or GPL licenses; but we’ll have to think through the usage cases and needs of the communities involved before we can make that choice.
This new firmware will be distributable by anyone to anyone in source or binary form. The existing closed firmware blob will be similarly redistributable as soon as we finish working with Marvell’s lawyers to get the right language on the license for it.
If there is an open source hardware manufacturer that can create this kind of device OPLC can use, let the people know.
I am absolutely blown away by the absolute ignorance of some of the comments posted in reply to this blog posting. Wow people. Please go buy some other operating system and leave freedom to those people who understand it. This laptop isn’t about helping poor children, it is about getting their names on a project and about making money. Kids need food, not laptops. Especially if they don’t even have electricity. Geez people, pull your head out of your butts please.
“””I am absolutely blown away by the absolute ignorance of some of the comments posted in reply to this blog posting…
Kids need food, not laptops. Especially if they don’t even have electricity.”””
Funny that you accuse others of ignorance… and then immediately proceed to reveal your own. These laptops do not require an outside source of electricity.
They also do mesh networking so that an entire village could share one internet connection. They are designed to allow these people to make the most of limited resources.
Obviously, food is a more basic need than computers. But once the most basic necessities are met, the laptops will allow these people to educate themselves, so that maybe, just maybe, they and their children can *STOP BEING POOR*.
But only if we can get beyond ignorant knee-jerk responses like yours.
Edited 2006-10-08 14:21
Theo de Raadt has the wrong organizations and people in his sights this time, and is harming open source and free software with irresponsible and ill-informed statments.
No, Theo is fighting for the good of the open source community. I think signing NDAs is what is harming the open source and free software.
Edited 2006-10-08 06:44
read again, and some comments above too…