A modest proposal for Meizu: open source the firmware!

pctwo

DChronos wrote:

<<The only reason I could see for this not to is, let's face it, it's communist China over there, and it would probably be considered treason to do it or something. Everyone's been hearing all about China lately with this Olympics buisiness going on.>>

some may argue open source is communistic and anti-capitalist. anyway, having once lived in a communist country, I can tell you communists are geniuses at justifying anything they want to do as being perfectly in line with communist principles, even if it's a 180 degree turn from what they were doing before.

dravik wrote:

<<No guys i don't think they would do this... if they do it other companys will base there mp3/4 player on it to....:'(>>

M6's strength is the decent hardware at lower price. the firmware, let's face it, is a close copy of the ipod, nothing unique or revolutionary. if Meizu can clone the iphone, trust me, other companies can clone Meizu if they want to, with or without the firmware.

edit: if Meizu doesn't want to officially open source the firmware for legal or other reasons, they could "accidentally" leak it to the net and disavow any unauthorized use of the leaked source while looking the other way with respect to what the community does with it. hey, stuff happens, right?

dravik

If they make it public I'm mickey mouse...

mfb

It would be awsome if Meizu released the source. The quality of the firmware could increase exponentially. If they release the firmware under the GPL, lots of GPLed code could be used to improve the firmware. For example the video decoding could be enhanced using open-source code from the FFmpeg-project. (libavcodec)

tERROR

yeah... going GPL would be great, I think most ppl don't realise how many coders are out there, that are longing for platforms that are open source. look at the open moko - the manufactor is just going to build the hardware, and code an simple OS - every other function is going to be written by the ppl itself.
that would be really a step forward... meizu would keep many satisfies customers, and woudn't have to bother it-self with bugfixes that we can solve on our own...

DChronos

There really is no reason not to. Like I said, firmware has to be coded specifically for the exact hardware it is to run on. You cannot use it on other hardware, or hardware with a slightly different setup, because it would fail to run correctly.

The only way to get their firmware to run on something other than an M6 is to: completely rewrite it all to work with the hardware (pretty stupid because it wouldn't save anything compared to just writing firmware from scratch), or completely copying the M6 on the inside... same screen, same circuit board, same chips, same everything. That would violate copyrights, even in China.

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dravik

We will see... i like mickey mouse so i hope they will give it:D

springo

Now that they are focused on M8 they should open-source the firmware to boost the sales of M6, otherwise they'll drop because people are waiting for the 'new' product (even though it's a total different thing).

arnaud

As far as I looked into the S2003.2 Firmware, they already make use of some open-source software. I found lots of references to sox (sox.sf.net) messages. The library is LGPL.

DChronos

I doubt the M8 is gonna sell better than the M6 after it's released, at $300, and phone/internet/online/etc. functions that probably will be a looong time before they work outside China at all. Until they set a network for THEIR phone all around the largest places in the world, none of the online and wireless stuff will even work. You'll just be buying a $300+ mp3 and video player. They better plan on the M6 and M3 still being their main source of income in the international market, and doing what they are now sure as hell isn't going to insure that.

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dtg

You make a lot of assumptions on the code base for being someone who has never seen it. You have no idea if the functions that access the registers and channels on the hardware are independent and layered separately from the code for mp3 playing, etc. It really just depends on how they structured it. Although given the speed in releases chances are its a mess and most code accesses the hardware directly, yet its still bad to just simply assume this to be true.

So ya if they did release code I would love to help out but right now I'm not counting on it and I'm not about to pull my player open to attempt to find a way in since I'm not a Comp E., I'm just a Comp Sci student.