There have been quite a few questions in the forums and on the comments about what libraries will be available, what codecs, what is open source etc. This short post will try and give people some idea of what will be available at or around launch time. It won’t be comprehensive – I am sure that for some it will generate more questions than answers, but I hope it will be of help.
Firstly, libraries. Any distribution will need to supply a set of closed source libraries that give access to the GPU acceleration features…
The Open/Closed source debate can become quite heated, as those perusing the comments and forums may have noticed. As stated above, the host side libraries for the graphics acceleration are closed source and are provided by the SoC supplier. The Foundation has no control over the closed nature of these libraries. Since the vast majority of people simply use libraries such as these, it was deeded a trade off worth making to get the high graphics performance. It’s worth noting there are no other SoC devices with a similar graphics performance that are open source. There is no GPL issue here, these are user side libraries not linked in any way to the kernel.
There are a few drivers for the SoC which are linked in to the kernel, these are GPLed and hence OSS. One of these drivers is the interface from the user space libraries to the GPU. The user side libraries use this ‘driver’ to communicate with the GPU and tell it what to do.
Here’s a handy diagram that may help visualise what’s what.
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An operating system named AROS for the Amiga is being ported for the Raspberry Pi.
Would Adafruit consider it open source?
I’m thinking no since there is no pathway without something closed source
@zuul – this is an easy question 🙂 the makers of the raspberry pi are not selling/promising the pi as oshw.