There is the possibility of using 4000 DC-125 on public schools in Ecuador. The requirement is that the software to be used is completely FSF approved. That means that the licenses for the drivers and firmware have Free Software Foundation approved licenses and that all source code is provided. (That means none of the source contains binaries too.)
Does this hardware comply? Sorry for the tight requirements. Thank you.
Hi Quiliro,
Thanks for posting to ask! Yes, 100% of the software is open source.
Specifically: 100% of the Fedora 17 automatic USB multiseat software and drivers - which allows the DC-125 to automatically launch new seats in Fedora 17 - is released under FSF approved licenses. There are no binary blobs. There is zero software license cost.
Breaking it down a little:
The DC-125 is an integrated unit with USB hub, audio, graphics, and two free ports for keyboard and mouse. It does not have a CPU or need to run software itself (the only software is on the main machine all the terminals connect to). It does however need drivers which run on the main machine, for each of its functions. These drivers are all open source and built-in for all recent Linux kernels:
* The C-Media USB audio device in the DC-125 is supported by Linux’s built-in USB standard audio class support. The license for the kernel code is GPLv2, the user mode portions are LGPL v2.1.
* The DisplayLink USB graphics device in the DC-125 is supported by Linux’s built-in udlfb kernel framebuffer driver (which we help maintain. http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel… ). The license for this code is GPLv2. The X server that talks to the framebuffer is BSD-style license (http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driv… )
* The rest of the USB hub functionality and ability to plug in USB mouse, keyboard, etc. is all standard USB with Linux in-kernel drivers
* Finally, the automatic USB multiseat support developed by Red Hat and others which is new in Fedora 17 and which supports the DC-125 and UD-160, is all open source. Most of it is under LGPL license. The key components are at http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/s… (by the way, although this support appears in Fedora 17, we expect it will be ported to other distros in coming months).
So it’s all open source, all in Fedora 17, and we expect it will get ported on from there fairly quickly.
The purchase of a few evaluation units would be the next step for your deployment in Ecuador. It’s important to see solutions like this in action to figure out the pros and cons. We’ll work with you to figure out the best way to do that.
Hope that helps. Thanks again for posting!
Bernie