[maemo-community] Proposal for community firmware images

[From: Quim Gil]

Hi, after asking the legal guys...

ext Carsten V. Munk wrote:
> As part of the work to provide images for the Mer project, I've been 
> investigating which parts are initial technical blockers for community 
> firmware images. The first step for this, is the contents of the initfs, 
> which include firmware blobs and such as described above needed for 
> basic connectivity and other basics.
> 
> I've documented the ones relating to initfs and the contents of it, on 
> http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Community_firmware_image_distribution in the 
> section "First request: Distribution of initfs jffs2 (or other formats) 
> image from maemo.org", along with reasoning for why they are needed to 
> provide useful community firmware images for any kind of community 
> distribution targeting the tablets.
> 
> The purpose of this request is to establish what would be needed legally 
> (Nokia) and technically (maemo.org) to be able to distribute these 
> initfs images containing these items from maemo.org to N800, N810 and 
> N810WE users, and to lay the foundation for future requests for 
> inclusion of closed source bits into community firmware images.

This step looks good and thanks to it now they are familiar with the
subject. However, they ask whether it would be possible to have a
complete list of closed components you need, so they can look at them in
one go and make a decision. This is specially relevant for 3rd parties
components.

We don't see any problem with the idea of redistributing Nokia owned
software to owners of Nokia devices, and the question to be decided is
only the best way to do it.

-- 
Quim Gil
open source advocate
Maemo Software @ Nokia