[maemo-community] [maemo-community] Opening the Flasher

[From: Quim Gil]

ext pancake wrote:
> Hello Quim!

Hi pancake, nice to see you around.  :)

> It sounds quite strange to me to see that Nokia aims to free their
> flasher now.. after two years having a public and free flasher
> utility for the nokia internet tablets and receiving no support
> from Nokia or the community to port the flasher to other operating
> systems or architectures.

It's all about priorities and context. Many things have changed at Nokia
since you released your flasher. At the time pushing the opening of the
official flasher would have taken a lot of effort and there were other
priorities. Now the context helps and the idea has been queuing for so
long that other priorities are solved now.

About lack of community support, perhaps a joint project on the official
code would be more appealing?


> The bug report will be closed if somebody owning a mac tries to
> build 0xFFFF from the sources. The only dependency is libusb, which
> is also available on OSX and the last thing I do for it was as GUI
> frontend, which is probably what OSX people is looking for.
> 
> About architectures, I have tested my flasher on multiple architectures
> with different endians without any problem, so it should work on ppc
> and x86.

Sure, but what if one day the architecture changes for whatever reason
and then you have your reverse engineered tool out of the game for new
releases? I'm not saying there are plans for such changes, but I guess
it's always more optimal that everybody works on the same tool.


> I assume that an unofficial flasher makes the community think that it
> can be a dangerous tool. But after two years of existence, nobody
> report me issues about bricked devices after using 0xFFFF as a flasher.
> 
> As i read in the last update of the OS. Nokia provides now an OTA flashing
> utility which allows to update the device without using an external
> computer and USB. (i didnt update my n810 yet, but i would be interested
> to see how it works :)
> 
> It is always good to see the intention of big companies freeing parts
> of their software, but I think that it is a bit late.

Perhaps, but here we are with the offer.

> I will be happy to see the evolution of the opening process of these
> closed parts of Maemo (not only the flasher) to allow the community
> enhace this wonderful software platform faster.

Should we take this as a yes?  :)

About opening fiasco-gen, it might happen as well. We will start
releasing it as a binary.


>> Hi, are you aware of
>>
>> https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1100#c5
>>
>> If we have a broad idea about the community interest in getting the
>> Flasher open in order to develop e.g. a Mac OS X version, then I will
>> have smoother path to get it open. Feel free commenting and voting
>> there. If you are aware of other potential contributors feel free
>> letting them know as well.
>>
>> I think we will get it open anyway, but as said showing objective
>> community interest always helps getting things done faster.
>>
>> PS: Very similar case with https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1013
>> (PowerPC support for the Flasher).
>>
>> -- 
>> Quim Gil
>> marketing manager, open source
>> Maemo Software @ Nokia
> 
>   --pancake
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-- 
Quim Gil