Hardware license terms


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Luke-Jr

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Aug 31, 2014
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Someone recently brought to my attention that the OpenPandora was in fact not freely licensed as I had previously thought (no doubt my fault). Will this also be true for the Pyra, or will the schematics be available under a free license this time?

My hope is that people will be free to fork and sell upgrades, such as a camera-included case, CPU board with more RAM, etc.

If I understand correctly from the pricing estimation thread, R&D costs will be shared between the Pyra sales upfront, so there should be no need for additional royalties from licensing, correct? (Has anyone actually licensed the OpenPandora schematics, or has the restriction only served to stifle derivatives?)
 
ED has said that he intends to release everything on the Pyra under some kind of open source license. The specifics haven't been worked out, as far as I know, as he's been busy actually getting the thing built, but I've no reason to doubt his word.

edit:
Also, I am 100% certain that the Pandora's lack of licensing has done nothing to stifle any derivatives. Instead, the tiny market and high cost did that and there is no doubt in my hindsighted mind that even with an entirely permissive license absolutely no knock-offs would've been produced.
The Pyra, however, with it's open modular approach, might actually see something in the future.
 
I'm not 100% sure what Nikolaus' plan is, I'm fine with releasing everything... though I doubt there'll be a lot of modifications.
It's hard getting parts in small quantities, so any derivates should be planned with a production of at least 2000 (usually more).

The MOQ for the OMAP5, e.g. is 2000, same for the displays.
 
As ED says, making a knock-off Pandora or Pyra is hard, but I can envisage parts of the Pyra being used in other devices, such as the exact layout of the shoulder buttons. That's probably less true with the Pandora, with other parts of the design having known disadvantages now, or just being pretty standard in other contexts.
 
Someone I was talking to the other day is planning to buy a competing device because it's open hardware and has free software GPU drivers, so I suggested that he fork the Pyra with a different SoC on the CPU board. That was when he brought up the license issue - I guess minimum quantities means he'd need to sell the remaining (although if the OMAP is the only thing on the CPU board with 2000 minimum, maybe he can get away with less since he'd be using a different SoC?).
 
Maybe ED can buy (number of preorders)+x units of the SoC for production run if devs pay ED the money for the x additional chips.
 
Luke-Jr said:
Someone I was talking to the other day is planning to buy a competing device because it's open hardware and has free software GPU drivers
Click to expand...
Can I ask what this is he has plans to buy? 'cause as far as I know there is nothing with enough of a feature overlap to call it "competing". The Windows based device that GPD is currently developing would probably be considered a competing device, but that's still in early development, and the currently selected SOC is apparently even less OSS friendly than the OMAP, if I'm to understand correctly (which isn't always the case)
On the other hand, I think the only non-libre driver that we'll need for the Pyra is the 3D acceleration, so it could arguably be a solution to simply not use the 3D: everything else should be fine.
Even if it isn't actually a direct competitor, knowing what people are buying and the SoC that is in that could be useful. Assuming your friend does fork the Pyra, what SoC would they plan to put in it that has open source GPU drivers?
 
WizardStan said:
Can I ask what this is he has plans to buy?
Click to expand...
http://www.gcw-zero.com/

WizardStan said:
'cause as far as I know there is nothing with enough of a feature overlap to call it "competing".
Click to expand...
For my purposes, it isn't competing. But apparently others don't need the Pyra's full feature set.

WizardStan said:
Even if it isn't actually a direct competitor, knowing what people are buying and the SoC that is in that could be useful. Assuming your friend does fork the Pyra, what SoC would they plan to put in it that has open source GPU drivers?
Click to expand...
CPU:Ingenic JZ4770 1 GHz MIPS processor
GPU:Vivante GC860, capable of OpenGL ES 2.0
 
ah! I was excited to hear what other handheld there could be. the gcw zero is well known here though. ED used to sell them in his shop. AFAIK they are becoming pretty rare though. no official shop sells them anymore since early 2015 and on ebay they fetch quite a price, I wish I had gotten one when I could've, very sleek design.
 
Well, there is also the Neo900 if you're looking at future alternatives, but I think I prefer the Pyra.
 
The Neo900 uses the same SoC as the Pandora Rebirth. It suffers the same GPU blob problem.

Luke-Jr said:
But apparently others don't need the Pyra's full feature set.
Click to expand...
Well yes, but then I wouldn't even recommend the Pandora/Pyra at all. There's a lot of options if you don't want a keyboard, not just the Zero.

edit: Also, if your friend is a purist, he should be aware that the only reason the Zero has open source drivers is because it was reverse engineered.
 
yeah I prefer the pyra aswell. I am just interested in most handhelds. in regards to the neo900, I actually bought a used n900 in anticipation of an updated mainboard, but the projects funds have been frozen by paypal for quite some time now and they are not able to resume development, let alone production. So I am really doubtful the whole affair will have a positive outcome. and the estimated price is far more then a pyra at about 600 euros, if you provide your own n900 which cost me 180 euros already.

EDIT: Actually, I just had a look on the neo900.org website and it seems they have solved their paypal trouble and are resuming work. there are no further details as to how they solved the issues though.
 
xnopasaranx said:
ah! I was excited to hear what other handheld there could be. the gcw zero is well known here though. ED used to sell them in his shop. AFAIK they are becoming pretty rare though. no official shop sells them anymore since early 2015 and on ebay they fetch quite a price, I wish I had gotten one when I could've, very sleek design.
Click to expand...

Well, the GCW is about as fast as the Pandora, so not really a competition ;)

We will have some more in stock soon, I'll start cleaning the ones I have from tonight on and they'll appear on the website sometimes in February :)
 
Luke-Jr said:
Well, there is also the Neo900 if you're looking at future alternatives, but I think I prefer the Pyra.
Click to expand...


Yeah at $1,000+ and no software devs, and way limited production. If it ever sells it will be in very small quantity and probably just run the original Maemo, with almost no improvements.

I loved my N900 and would like a Neo, but it just isn't worth it.
 
neko said:
You mean the original 600 MHz Pandora, right?

I have a GCW Zero... it's slow.
Click to expand...
I think it should be as fast as a 1GHz, approximately.
However, it's MIPS, and many emulators are ARM-optimized.
 
Dimacus said:
Huh, I though the gcw-zero still used the firmware blob for the GPU and only the userspace driver was open?
Click to expand...
That used to be the case, but the GPU was reverse engineered enough to produce open source drivers.
 
As far as I know driver != firmware. At least it should.
The driver is the piece of software which runs on the host machine, while the firmware runs on the device itself.
Any Linux driver which isn't OSS would violate the kernel's GPL. However, the OSS driver can without any problem send a proprietary firmware on a device and communicate with a closed-source user level program which implements OpenGL.
 
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