Reverse engineering Android from binary to source
dmitry.gr
dmitry.gr
> As per the GPL (under which the Linux kernel is licensed), the manufacturer had to have provided a written offer of sources. Needless to say that a random chinese company (SmartQ, currently owned by Huami) does not care even a little about this sort of thing. I checked theit site every which way I could, and found no sources. Emaling them produced no reply, of course. Of course, why would it? I tried to find some people on LinkedIn who might help, but I was told in no uncertain terms to go away.
With increasing amounts of SW development moving to low-cost countries, this sort of attitude may well eventually destroy the availability of the 'free' software that these manufacturers rely on (besides hurting the GPL + homebrew firmware communities).
Even in developed countries, a lot of projects that historically chose BSD or MIT ("why should we choose GPL? Companies will contribute back anyway") are starting to change their mind because more and more companies just take publicly available code and sell it, never contributing back. Just think about Google (which uses Apache code, but doesn’t contribute back) or VMware (which openly violates the GPL).
As long as humans are greedy, we’ll have to find a technical solution to protect against such immoral people or organizations.
But it's worth remembering that Google's involvement goes further than just extra commits. For example - if Google uses something, they'll likely do a better security testing of the product than many other companies. Their security reports always go back to other projects.
Simple: While legally there’s a difference between Apache and GPL, from a purely ethical standpoint, there isn’t really – you took something that belonged to the public, you contribute back to the public.
> Simple: While legally there’s a difference between Apache and GPL, from a purely ethical standpoint, there isn’t really – you took something that belonged to the public, you contribute back to the public.
Which leads to the question "why not use the GPL for everything?". To be honest, I actually fall into the camp of "we should be pushing for the GPL for most non-trivial software".
I disagree. Outside of Raleigh, I think Google is currently one of the biggest champions of 'giving back' in letter and spirit (code contributions and research papers). Would you mind expanding on how Google doesn't give back?
Google took the code and closed almost all of it.
They took, but don’t give back: The Email Client, the Launcher, the Dialer, the Calendar, the Contacts app – all of that is now closed source.
You can’t do anything on Open Source Android anymore.
Not the least because it's quite unfair competition for companies based in countries where the GPL is more likely to be enforced!
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297
Consider if the SoC was from Broadcom or Qualcomm or some other Western company. You'd probably be able to get source code, but having that doesn't show as much about what else the hardware can do as they're not going to share datasheets with you (and there's unlikely to be anyone willing to leak them either.)
Edit: have you looked at Ingenic's site? They have what appears to be Linux source code available:
Yeah that's why you need trade deals which include strong intellectual property provisions like ACTA, TPP, TTIP. Ohh wait we're all supposed to hate those because Hollywood. But yeah if you want copyright protection for GPL code you also get copyright for other things.
I'd argue that the most critical piece of work is power management for the watch. Did this magically port over or does the system just run at full whack?
Cheers,
Nick
But in all seriousness, getting Debian/X on this probably wouldn't be that hard after dmitry's work, probably just getting a basic working framebuffer driver, packing a modified Debian ramdisk and the kernel blob in an aboot image, and having the ramdisk bootstrap the rootfs on the NAND, start X with fbdev, and load MicroWM or something. That was basically what I did a while back trying to get Angstrom on a Chinese camera that ran Android and it worked okay...
That is to say that the work is all done for you. Enjoy :)