I was deliberately rude because your sole interest is trumpeting that you are right and everyone else is wrong.
Everyone else? I did not notice that somebody else is "trumpeting" getting GPL source code of instrument, just you.
What did you expect? - That everybody here will applaud "yes you are so right!" and that's it? Whole purpose of discussion is to discuss
Obviously I do not share naive optimism of yours: "It seems to me far more effective to get the GPL code released and fix the bugs", so I tell you that source code you can get such way (if any) will have just some irrelevant (to instrument function) code.
I suggest you read your own post. I did *not* put words in your mouth.
I said "some irrelevant kernel code modifications", you read "GPL code is irrelevant". What a stretch.
You have no way of knowing what I do or do not know.
Obviously I can comment only about what you said here. And you were mistaken about many things.
Fact is I have repaired several analog scopes including a Tek 465. I also have over 30 years of DSP experience.
What can I say - respect!
Regarding mine experience: while ago I was involved in design decision making of Linux-based device (not test instrument obviously) and can assure that Linksys router "incident" was isolated one. Other companies do not make such a stupid mistakes and oscilloscopes are not routers as well.
If you actually knew what a DSO is doing, you would not consider it very complex. It's not.
Right.
There are some significant timing challenges, but that and broadband circuit design are the only hard parts. The timing constraints pretty much dictate everything about the VHDL code for the FPGA. There's just not much wiggle room in how the logic is laid out on the device.
So you just explained what DSO is doing, right?
As regards the Agilent thread, I'd seen it, but never bothered to read it. As I suspected, it's almost entirely about enabling license options.
Sure it talks about enabling licenses, but this is not why I mentioned that thread. You missed that all the application code of particular instrument is binary Java code which do not fall under GPL. By requesting source code you would get tiny part, close to nothing of what you need to fix bugs.
The primary purpose of having people ask for the source is to make clear to the the low end Chinese T & M OEMs that there is a marketing advantage to making their products "open source" and allowing the user community to write apps for the instruments.
Initially you said something completely different: "It seems to me far more effective to get the GPL code released and fix the bugs than it does to engineer a new instrument from scratch."
Substantial parts of the UIs are written in a scripting language. Once one has the ability to run a script that reads button presses and sends commands to the FPGA and the ARM host, pretty much all the functionality of the unit becomes accessible. That's not a very high bar.
What's the point of changing buttons if you cannot add or modify
functions of instrument?
The T & M OEMs are using the dev tools provided by the chip makers.
Indeed they use dev tools provided by chip makers! If they use Xilinx FPGA - they for sure use Vivado suite.
So what?If you're not interested in having an open source instrument, that's fine with me. I and other people are.
This is good one
I just say that asking source code of Linux based devices is dead end. You shall re-read thread to see that I am not against open source instrument/scope, also I have my own idea what open source scope shall look like.
Unfortunately, you seem to have driven them away.
Wow this is something. You blame me that others do not stand on your side. How convenient.
Your assertions amount to saying that the Chinese are able to clone competitor's instruments but no one else can even grasp how they work.
It's just you who do not know which functions of DSO is handled by FPGA and which - by CPU or scripting language
I don't recall that the Chinese invented the stuff they're making. They just copied American products using American parts.
Seriously?
With the same success we can say that Americans also did not invent stuff they are making. Stuff was invented by German inventor.