Draft letter to Texas Instruments

[Mychaela Falconia]

For a bit of contrast, here is *my* draft letter to TI which I composed
back in May of this year, but which I never sent.  It was meant to be
printed and snail-mailed, hence it's written in troff with -ms macros:
I'm a very old-fashioned UNIX user.

.TL
Request to license obsolete GSM baseband software
.LP
Dear Texas Instruments,
.PP
My name is Mychaela Falconia, and I am a private individual not affiliated with
any company or organization whatsoever.
I am writing to you with a request for permission to make legal use of a
certain extremely obsolete piece of software which is believed to be under
TI's copyright, a piece of software which I am currently forced to use
in ways which are believed to be illegal because this ultra-obsolete software
is the only means available to me to relieve my suffering for which there is
no other known cure.
.PP
The software in question is the reference firmware for the Calypso and
LoCosto GSM baseband processors which (to the best of my knowledge) are no
longer made, sold or supported by TI, and whose end of life occurred many
years ago.
Just to be clear, I am \fInot\fP asking TI to provide me with a copy of this
software or to provide any support for it, instead I am merely asking for
permission to make use of the source code which I already have \(em I found
it freely on the Internet via Google searches.
.PP
I suffer from a condition which I call proprietary software dysphoria.
With this condition I experience severe distress whenever I am forced to use
any piece of electronic technology which I am unable to improve myself (fix
functional defects) or customize to suit my own tastes and preferences
because I lack the source code for the firmware that controls the operation
of the device.
In the present phase of my life, the devices that trigger my dysphoria most
acutely are cellular telephone handsets, particularly the plain, non-smart
ones \(em I have never used a smartphone and never will, as they are far too
complex for my minimal needs.
.PP
I currently have a fairly large collection of old cellphones of the plain,
non-smart kind that have been built with TI's Calypso chipset.
All of these phones were made by small boutique manufacturers that have long
been out of business, hence contacting these manufacturers for assistance
is absolutely impossible.
All of these phones also exhibit various crippling defects which are clearly
the fault of the firmware they came with, rather than the hardware: badly
misdesigned user interface, occasional misbehavior on the GSM network,
seemingly random flash file system corruption etc.
As an expert embedded software engineer I know without a doubt that I could
fix all of these flaws if I had the source code for their firmware, but
given that the manufacturers in question are long out of business, it is very
likely that this source code has been lost forever, gone to the great bit
bucket in the sky.
.PP
However, after spending several years of my life searching every obscure corner
of the Internet for any and all information on the old GSM baseband chipsets
that used to be made by TI, I have located copies of some of the deliverables
which you apparently provided to your chipset customers (handset manufacturers)
back in those long-bygone days \(em the CD enclosed with this letter contains
what I managed to find in terms of actual code, as opposed to merely verbal
documentation.
I am now actively working on a project to
improve my quality of life by replacing the original proprietary firmware in
aftermarket Calypso phones made years ago by long-defunct manufacturers
with a new fully
functional source-enabled firmware which I reconstruct from the fragments of
your TCS2.1.1 and TCS3.2 firmware sources which I managed to find,
as presented on the enclosed CD.
.PP
I now have everything I need for my project in terms of materials, knowledge
and tools, hence I don't need any materials or technical support from TI.
However, the free software community has shunned me and my project:
they argue that my project is illegal because I am producing a derived work
based on the scattered bits and pieces of TI source code I found on the
Internet, code which they say is still copyrighted by TI even though the
product line in question has been defunct for many years, without having
obtained explicit permission from TI as the copyright holder to do what I seek.
.PP
I thus wonder if you might perchance be willing to make my life a little easier
by giving me explicit permission to do the following:
.IP (1)
Maintain my own Calypso GSM firmware that is a derived work based on
the old TI source bits contained in the 3 Internet finds on the enclosed CD;
.IP (2)
Run the firmware from (1) on devices which I legitimately bought on the used
surplus market and which were made in a distant past by companies which,
I presume, legitimately paid whatever royalty TI asked of them for running
TI-developed software on their products;
.IP (3)
Share my work (1) with other people who suffer from the same condition
and have the same needs as I do.
.LP
In the interest of honesty, I have to admit that I absolutely \fIcannot\fP
abstain from doing my project even if you deny me the permission I am asking
for \(em instead I will have to take my project underground and work on it
in total social isolation while being shunned and ostracized by everyone
around me, and also living in constant fear of being arrested and imprisoned
for the crime of copyright infringement.
But as bleak as this alternative is, I have absolutely no other choice:
because of my psychological condition it is absolutely impossible for me
to live a meaningful life without having firmware in my ancient Calypso-based
``dumbphone'' which I compile myself from source and which I can therefore
improve and customize.
Therefore, I deeply wish that you find enough kindness and compassion
in your hearts to make it legal for me to do what I cannot live without.
.sp 1.5
.PP
Thank you for your time and consideration,
.sp
.nf
Mychaela Falconia
mychaela at ivan.Harhan.ORG

-- EOF --

Notice how, when I composed the above draft back in May, I wasn't
asking for any additional code pieces.  Two things have happened
between then and now that sparked my current burning desire to obtain
a more complete copy of TCS211:

* Over the course of 2015 (starting right then in May) we have got our
  blob-free gcc-built GSM firmware up and running.  Back in 2014 I had
  put it together using LoCosto versions of L1 and G23M (the two pieces
  which are binary blobs in our copy of TCS211, hence the only available
  sources were LoCosto and TSM30), I got it to compile, but it wasn't
  complete enough to do any real testing, i.e., to tell if it even
  works at all or not.  The code became complete (all necessary pieces
  integrated) in the spring of this year, and over the summer we got
  it mostly working.  And only in the most recent fall months did I
  reach the realization that our current LoCosto-based L1 code is
  broken on the Calypso in a way which I can't figure out how to fix
  except in one of the following two ways:

  (a) obtain a copy of some original L1 source that targets the Calypso
      (right version, not TSM30) and not LoCosto, or

  (b) painstakingly reconstruct this source from the working binary
      objects version.

* This August I managed to find and obtain (from a seller in Singapore
  who otherwise deals mostly with medical equipment, of all things) a
  piece of very historical actual hardware made by TI, an official
  development kit for their hardware and software:

  https://www.freecalypso.org/boards/ds-pics/

  I would really, really love to make this baby run, but it has TI's
  older Clara RF (not the Rita used in the commercially-made phones
  and modems we target), and we have no driver code for Clara at all,
  neither source nor object.  Hence the only way I'll ever get this
  D-Sample board running would be if we obtain a more complete copy of
  TCS211.  D-Sample was one of the two official targets for TCS211
  (the other being Leonardo, which is the baseline from which the
  commercial phones and modems we target were made), hence a complete
  copy of TCS211 should include everything needed in order to run on
  the D-Sample.

M~