from the open-open-source-to-be-open-and-open-source dept.
Bunnie Huang, author of the seminal 2003 Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering, has been working on bridging the western concept of formal and legalistic open source with the eastern implementation of an informal quid pro quo approach to intellectual property that he has dubbed "gongkai" which is a transliteration of the chinese word most closest in meaning to the "open" in "open source."
One of the benefits of chinese gongkai is the extremely broad variety and rapid evolution of consumer electronics, he writes:
Chinese entrepreneurs, on the other hand, churn out new phones at an almost alarming pace. Phone models change on a seasonal basis. Entrepreneurs experiment all the time, integrating whacky features into phones, such as cigarette lighters, extra-large battery packs (that can be used to charge another phone), huge buttons (for the visually impaired), reduced buttons (to give to children as emergency-call phones), watch form factors, and so forth. This is enabled because very small teams of engineers can obtain complete design packages for working phones – case, board, and firmware – allowing them to fork the design and focus only on the pieces they really care about.
To that end he's created the Fernvale project to fully reverse engineer and publicly document a feature-rich mobile-phone board. His goal is to take widely available hardware and make it as accessible as the Raspberry Pi but price it at one fifth the price, roughly $6 in single quantities.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by lizardloop on Wednesday December 31 2014, @01:12PM
Just wanted to say what a fascinating article this was. For me embedded software developers are the real heroes. I dabbled briefly with the embedded software briefly before being swallowed up in the whale of web development and I miss it sorely.
I remember trying to get smooth 2d graphics working on the PS3 back when you could still install linux on it. We wondered why it was so slow at moving stuff around on screen and started doing some debugging of the underlying GTK framework we were using. Turns out our carefully prepared chunk of memory with all the pixels for the screen was being copied pixel by pixel inside the GTK framework. The PS3 has some powerful graphics hardware but it's CPU is a 300mhz chip if I remember correctly and we were trying to move around a HD picture at 1920x1080. Framerates improved dramatically once we switched to using cairo for our graphics rendering library.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday December 31 2014, @07:46PM
The long term result of that is that the Chinese companies will EAT western companies like road kill. Because the west IP model isn't sustainable. When young people goes missing in an industry. It's a sign it will vanish.
So what mobile phones use the MT6260 ARM7EJ-S CPU ..?
I guess the radio modem DSP contains code from the three letter Chinese counterpart. And thus is worthwhile to de-blob.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 31 2014, @09:56PM
"Chinese entrepreneurs had relatively unfettered access to cutting-edge technology"
Well, in theory, isn't China still a Communist country? You know, the governments that did things like publish
books with no copyrights?