Arduino phone.

Thu Jun 18 21:29:25 UTC 2015

> > 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.

To be honest, I'm very surprised to read this at this point. If we've
had that discussion 3 years ago, I may have agreed with you to some
extent, but I don't think that's a luxury we can afford now that Edward
Snowden has revealed the truth about what's going on regarding
government spying.

There are many accounts of government agencies doing this sort of
things. You might want to check out the CALEA program, which among
others, forces manufacturers to make their devices spy-able:
https://www.eff.org/issues/calea

> 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.

I understand. However, this security aspect is yet another point that I
wish you attracted user's attention to. You may not care deeply about
it, but I'm sure that this is in the interest of a large amount of
people looking for a free baseband.

> > 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.

Makes sense from your perspective.

> > 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.

Well, I wish it turns out for the best, honestly.

> > 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.)

Oh believe me when I tell you that I try to put all my heart towards
being part of the solution to such matters. I am not working on
OsmocomBB specifically, but various other free software pieces, which
already keep me busy.

> 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.

I don't really get the argument here. Just because you have spent some
time on it means that you wouldn't let it go for anything in the world?
I would expect that you'd be willing to give up on a project once proven
that it's worthless (not that this is the case here, I believe what
you're doing makes sense form your perspective, I'm mostly commenting
about my perspective).

And by the way, if FreeCalypso was your baby, it would get 99% of its
DNA from TI, which makes it very much less your own ;)

> > 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 am far from convinced that this is actually true (the killing part),
there are still basic human rights floating around as far as I know.
Still I'm not a lawyer, so I won't pretend that I know what I'm talking
about.

The point is, I don't know you and I have no idea whether what you are
saying is true. Once again, it is only up to believing your good word
that you have in fact renounced to your citizenship and that even then,
you would have no legal right to exercise your copyright.

So in the end, I believe my point still stands.

> 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.

IANAL

> > 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.

That's correct, they have already been acting with that in mind and the
leaked source code itself doesn't change the situation for OsmocomBB.

> 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.

That's more like what I'm talking about. There is a risk there. Perhaps
it is small an can be ignored, but I would be very sad if it was to slow
down contributions to 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.

Fair enough, I suppose. My point is that this is true both ways: just
like I have no moral right to ask you to give up on your project for the
sake of OsmocomBB, it goes the other way round too if your project does
compromise OsmocomBB's future. So let's try and keep things balanced.

-- 
Paul Kocialkowski, Replicant developer

Replicant is a fully free Android distribution running on several
devices, a free software mobile operating system putting the emphasis on
freedom and privacy/security.

Website: http://www.replicant.us/
Blog: http://blog.replicant.us/
Wiki/tracker/forums: http://redmine.replicant.us/
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