Arduino phone.

[Spacefalcon the Outlaw]

Paul Kocialkowski <contact at paulk.fr> wrote:

> There are still a few points that you might want to consider that are
> not related to legal issues. For instance, the fact that using the TI
> codebase might bring a serious trust and security issue.

I am not paranoid enough to worry about the possibility of deliberate
backdoors and such in the code base from TI.  Sure, it is possible,
but if I were to worry about such hypothetical things, logically I
would then also have to worry about monsters under my bed and whatnot:
just as possible hypothetically, but just as unlikely in practice.

Is the code written very poorly in some places?  It sure is.  Is it
replete with possible buffer overflows and whatnot?  It sure is.  But
I have no other alternative.  It is the only code base I have access
to that implements the functionality I need.  Reimplementing it from
scratch is not an option for me - far beyond my capabilities.

> It just seems like a waste of time and ressources to me [...]

It may be a waste from your perspective, but for me transitioning from
what I use currently (a dumbphone running its original proprietary fw
for which I have no source) to a dumbphone of my own make running
FreeCalypso fw will make a huge improvement in my quality of life.

And I'm not even talking about the guts of the GSM protocol stack - I
don't really understand them all that well anyway - I just seek the
ability to make my *non-smart* phone UI work exactly the way I like;
having the GSM protocol stack in full source form is something that
just happens to get included at no extra cost with my effort to free
the dumbphone UI, as on dumbphones the two form a monolithic whole.

> Note that I am not the biggest fan of copyright laws and all the things
> you decided to reject. I simply believe complying with those is the only
> safe way to achieve anything substantial, that will last in the long
> term.

Only time will tell.  Maybe you will turn out right in the event that
"they" catch me and put me away in a supermax prison, all other FC
project supporters will scatter away in fear and that will be the end
of it.  Or maybe I will succeed in producing my Free Dumb Phone and
put these phones in the hands of enough people that the movement will
become unstoppable even if I were eliminated.

> There are also technical and security-related reasons why I prefer
> OsmocomBB over your project, as I mentioned already.

Then why don't you work on it and bring it into a state where it could
seriously compete with commercially produced GSM modem and dumbphone
firmwares.  (And this statement is directed not at you personally, but
at everyone who dismisses FreeCalypso and promotes OsmocomBB instead.)

Try going into the maternity ward of your local hospital and telling
some random woman that she should discard her own baby and go care for
someone else's baby instead - I doubt that you would get a positive
reaction.  It's the same way with projects.  FreeCalypso is my baby.
OsmocomBB is someone else's baby.  That is really what it comes down
to in the end.

> Right. I also mentioned that your project is not free software since it
> lacks any kind of copyright notice regarding the code you produced. This
> makes sense from your point of view but then again, puts basically
> everyone who doesn't both agree with you and trust you at risk.
>
> You may sue anybody for using your work at the moment.

No, I cannot.  I can't sue anybody for anything, nor can I step into a
courthouse at all without being immediately arrested and deported to
an internment camp for undesirable stateless persons.  Whichever
country I happen to live in at any given moment, I live in it
illegally, with no right to live there.  I have RENOUNCED my
citizenship - it seems like you haven't grasped that part.  I have NO
legal rights at all, none whatsoever - not even a right to life.  If
you were to shoot and kill me in the street, you should not be
prosecuted for it, and you might even be entitled to a reward.

I truly do not understand how an outlaw like me, a person with no
legal right to even life, let alone any other legal rights, can have
any kind of copyright claims.

> Surely, you could take into account how it affects other people,
> regardless of the legal considerations involved. Doing harm to people,
> even for reasons that seem righteous, is still doing harm to people.
>
> I don't think you should ignore the possibility that your project may
> free a small percentage of people and doom the rest of us by making
> contributions to OsmocomBB impossible to manage.

All TI code components which I'm using have been leaked by third
parties that are either unknown or known but unconnected to me, and
have been publicly available long before my project came along.  The
oldest of the available TI source leaks (TSM30) has even been
acknowledged by the OsmocomBB folks themselves, in that they openly
admitted to using it as a source of knowledge of how to do various L1
tasks.

Thus if OsmocomBB is in danger of having its contributions tainted,
that situation would remain unchanged even if I stopped working on my
project.  Well, OK, a large part of what I'm doing with TI's code in
FreeCalypso is porting it to build in a Unix or GNU/Linux environment
instead of Windows.  You could perhaps argue that by making this code
build under GNU/Linux and providing a hardware platform to test this
code and prove it working, I am making it easier for someone to take
pieces of this code and plop them into OsmocomBB.

But even aside from the vastly different architectures of the two
firmwares that would make a transplant more difficult than a from-
scratch reimplementation, if OsmocomBB folks want to be sure that all
their code is from scratch and not borrowed from other projects, it is
entirely upon them to ensure so.  You have no moral right to ask other
people to drop their projects and suffer as a result just to make
OsmocomBB's job easier.

VLR,
SF