It's Not Free Enough

A little while ago I decided to start hacking something together on one of these cheap ARM dev boards. As it happens I chose the Freescale i.MX53 "quick start" board, but the situation is essentially the same on all of them: they aren't sufficiently open to be useful.

In this case, what got me was the closed MPEG decoder block. It has a driver which downloads a binary blob (actually a DSP executable) for the format that you want to decode, and then shuffles data back and forth in shared memory. But when you get decoded video frames out, they don't include the corresponding timestamp from the input MPEG stream. So the only way to do A/V sync is a hack. If the DSP code were open source, then I could add probably just a few dozen lines to it to propagate the timestamps and everything would be great.

My point is that wanting a free graphics system is not only a moral, philosophical argument, but also a practical issue that gets in the way of making good use of these chips.

If anything, the Raspberry Pi is less open that the alternatives since the closed GPU is "on top". Its proponents also have less excuse for the closed graphics system, since in their case it is their own IP; in most of the other cases the vendor has licensed it from a third party (e.g. TI from PowerVR).

Will someone wake me up when something changes?