OLPC under fire for proprietary components

Over the last week or so, there's been a big storm a'brewin' in the whole One Laptop Per Child community. The short of it is that a couple of the big players in the open source community have their code twisted in a bunch. What's the problem? Well, it turns out that the Marvell 88W8388 WiFi chip (selected for the 2B1) has a unique ability to create an ad-hoc mesh network without using the CPU, which keeps the computer consuming as little power as possible. However, this chip choice doesn't really jibe with the whole free software ethos behind OLPC. According to The Jem Report, Marvell "refuses to allow OpenBSD and other free software operating systems to freely distribute firmware binaries that are necessary to use Marvell wireless devices." This situation has turned into one big nerd cluster-cat fight, pitting Jim Gettys, the VP of software for OLPC, against über-hackers Theo de Raadt (founder of OpenBSD and OpenSSH) and Richard Stallman (who needs no introduction). Gettys defends the actions of the OLPC by saying: "If anyones feels 'betrayed,' it is because they are ill-informed, and that uninformed, biased and intemperate people informed them incorrectly of the situation." To which de Raadt countered: "Jim is obviously very clever at convincing people that children need proprietary laptops (OLPC has a greater percentage of undocumented hardware than a Thinkpad from 3 years ago). It is easy for Jim to convince people these things because he doesn't care at all about the future maintainance of drivers. I do. And I think most of you also do." Wow, them be fightin' words -- we're pulling up ringside seats already.

Read - The Jem Report
Read - Jim Gettys
Read - Theo de Raadt

[Via Slashdot]

[arbilli @ Oct 11th 2006 9:31AM]

Sounds like Mr. Gettys needs to take care of this Uwe Boll style. Take all the naysayers in a no holds barred death match.

[James @ Oct 11th 2006 9:40AM]

I didn't know that this project was about open source, i though that it was just chosen because of its ease of use and cheap licensning fee. I though the project was about getting notebooks for all those starving etheopians or something. Should this really be such a big debate? It's the only current option out there that makes sense, well as far as I know. Uses hardware to do ad-hoc and has less power consumption, sounds cool.

[John Stracke @ Oct 11th 2006 10:46AM]

I'm pretty sure OLPC was supposed to be open source so that people could use them to learn programming, with a nice library of examples to learn from.

More pragmatically, closed-source drivers in an open-source OS are a terrible idea; they always lag behind the kernel. I remember, back in 2000, at an IETF meeting, I borrowed an 802.11b card for my laptop, only to discover that the only driver available worked only with an old version of the kernel. Said version had had a security bug so serious, Red Hat had warned users not to use it on any system with a network.

However, I suspect de Raadt is mainly upset because this means BSD won't be able to run on the OLPC.

[MPG @ Oct 11th 2006 10:11AM]

"I didn't know that this project was about open source, i though that it was just chosen because of its ease of use and cheap licensning fee. I though the project was about getting notebooks for all those starving etheopians or something."

I think the point is that starving Ethopians can't exactly afford a WinXP license, so it would be a huge advantage if these laptops could run an open source OS as opposed to turning this into a potential cash cow for Microsoft.

[teo @ Oct 11th 2006 10:12AM]

Freeware/linux mafia strikes again

[James @ Oct 11th 2006 10:18AM]

"opposed to turning this into a potential cash cow for Microsoft"

I don't see how firmware for a NIC has anything to do with being a cash cow for microsoft.

[John Stracke @ Oct 11th 2006 12:38PM]

Having read all the referenced pages, it does look to me as if de Raadt is overreacting. Marvell's mesh feature is useful, and they genuinely can't release the current firmware as open source, but they are letting it be redistributed, and they are permitting OLPC to develop an open-source replacement. They won't publish the specs for the hardware (OLPC will have to sign an NDA to write the replacement firmware), but even RMS admits that signing an NDA could be ethical, as long as they resulting software is free (as in freedom, of course).

In fact, it's not clear to me what proprietary hardware de Raadt is complaining about. He might be assuming that the SD controller (also from Marvell) is locked down; and, in fact, their original chip was. But, at OLPC's request, Marvell has already developed a new SD controller that complies with the SD Forum's publicly-available HCI spec, so that the Linux hdci driver (part of the kernel as of 2.6.17) will work with it. AMD has released the Geode's VSA (basically an in-chip emulation layer, like Transmeta's LongRun), minus the VESA part that they didn't own (and which OLPC doesn't need). Aside from those, the only device de Raadt identifies as requiring an NDA is the camera--not exactly an essential component.

de Raadt says, "If I am careful in selection, I can buy a laptop on the market today that has fewer proprietary parts."; but fewer than one sounds really unlikely. Oh, and the 2B1 runs LinuxBIOS; *no* other laptop on the market can say that.

[PEZ @ Oct 11th 2006 11:17AM]

Borre, you just blew your 15 minutes of fame. Congrats. Wipe off your chin.

As for this article - thats about the stupidest thing I have ever read. Oh, and you might as well introduce Stallman, because his name dosnt ring a bell, if you dont care about about sauce.

Hahahahaha...

[Wilhelm @ Oct 11th 2006 12:38PM]

Nana nana nana nana Stallman!

[Borre @ Oct 11th 2006 6:01PM]

What I wonder is, do they have Sony batteries in these things?

[Joshua Krell @ Oct 11th 2006 7:40PM]

Is this really such a huge issue?