Thread: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
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lardman is offline lardman
2008-12-09 , 09:54
Posts: 2,102 | Thanked: 1,309 times | Joined on Sep 2006
#78
2) It works with your custom compiled HAL. Will it works with my system using Fremantle HAL and libraries? Will it works with someone else's GCC5 compiled system? If Nokia wants to see a thriving system programming community they need to give us source or information, not binaries.
No they don't need to give us source, this would be the ideal, but it probably won't happen due to the hardware being used in other devices. Further down the line, when it's no longer in any current device then perhaps.

In the meantime Nokia have made available the HAL plugin and have said they can and will provide other binaries as needed. Note that the Nokia developers do have other stuff to do (and this support is not official), so I would expect that the major projects such as Mer would have binaries available, but not that everyone can email and say I want a binary for such and such libc/kernel version.

That might not be a problem anyway depending on how the binary is structured, assuming the ARM ABI doens't change again for a while.

3) Thanks for this pointer. It clearly shows that there are quite large stumbling blocks left by Nokia for "community system". The binaries necessary for system operations need to be distributable. I don't see any progree in that direction for the three years that this subject is coming up. Is it legal to distribute a Deblet image containing hald-addon-bme?
Did you read Peter's post earlier, Nokia are changing/have changed the licence agreement to enable the closed parts which are needed to be distributed in custom/community images.
Last edited by lardman; 2008-12-09 at 09:56.
 

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