A Popular European Cable Modem Is Now Open-Source

A popular European cable modem has seen its software open-sourced by Technicolor in order to comply with the GPL.

Phoronix reader Adam Kalisz can be thanked in part for this effort and he's shared the story with us below.

The sources to the Technicolor TC72XX cable modem very frequently used in Europe in Ireland, Germany and Czech Republic e.g. have been published on Github.

Because the bridging capability on my Technicolor TC7200 was awful, I was interested, what I could do to fix this for me. The advice in various forums was mostly trial and error kind of stuff. But I also noticed, that Technicolor and UPC CZ are probably not in compliance with the GPLv2.

After about half a year of back and forth with those companies, I convinced Technicolor to comply with GPL an embrace the open source more, or at least make a code drop. Technicolor TC7200, TC7210, TC7230 should have their codebase open sourced and available on Github (including firmware):

eCos Library: https://github.com/tch-opensrc/TC72XX_BFC5.5.10mp1_OpenSrc

Operating System: https://github.com/tch-opensrc/TC72XX_LxG1.0.10mp5_OpenSrc

As you will notice, there is no licence notice in the root directory, but this should apply and click on the "TC7200, TC7200.U, TC7210 and TC7230" tab. There are further notices in the files. Some do seem to be proprietary, so please double check.

As for the TC7200, the problem with a missing firmware seems to have been fixed and there is specific BCM3383 firmware after a short high level inspection. This could also mean, the BCM33843 chip has a publicly available firmware now, since that chip is pin and software compatible with BCM3383.