Back from the GPL Compliance Engineering Workshop in Taipei

I've been a bit over a week in Taipei, mainly to co-present (with Armijn Hemel) the GPL compliance engineering workshop at Academia Sinica. The workshop was attended by more than 100 representatives of the local IT industry in Taiwan, from both legal and engineering departments.

I think even only the sheer number of attendees is a great sign to indicate how important the subject of Free Software license compliance has become in the IT industry, and specifically in the embedded consumer electronics market.

I would like to use this opportunity again to thank the OSSF at Academia Sinica for doing a great job in organizing this event.

Thanks also to Armijn, who not only does excellent work at gpl-violations.org but also covered the majority of the presentations at the workshop.

So what did I do the remaining week? Lots of meetings, mostly with companies regarding GPL compliance, but also with old friends like Wolfgang Spraul and Holger Freyther who happened to be in the city at the same time.

I also had some very exciting meetings related to my various GSM related FOSS projects, but it is too early to really say anything about them.

Starting to work on drivers for the Mediatek MT6139/MT6140 RF Transceiver

In the last two days, I have finally started to get some initial work done on the OsmocomBB port for the Mediatek chipsets. My current focus is the MT6139/6140 RF Transceiver, including stuff like setting it up for Rx and Tx, computing the VCO/PLL dividers for all ARFCNs in 4 bands for uplink and downlink, etc.

Next will probably be the drivers for the MTK digital baseband BPI (baseband parallel interface) and BSI (baseband serial interface), which are needed to actually use the MT6139/6140 driver, as well as the antenna switch module, power amplifier and other parts of the RF front-end.

I'm not really testing any of this code at the moment, as I'm travelling a lot without access to my Racal 6103 or other GSM handset testing equipment. However, writing even untested code helps me understand the chipset better and is a first step in the right direction. I guess January 2011 will provide more time to continue/complete this task.