I think we need to bring this back to simple.

1) as FOSS not out to harm allwinnertech all FOSS want is conformance with 
license.

Reality here the two worst laws to break as a hardware vendor is copyright and 
trademark.   Serous-ally.   Both you can enforce by customs both can cause 
product destruction.   This is pure nightmare because what would happen if a 
developer of the work decided to take the customs path a stack of product for 
one of allwinner customers would get to the board be ruled as contain copyright 
infringing work then crushed.   This has happened to gameconsoles and other 
items in the past.   The buyer is left out of pocket.

Its basically a common mistake since FOSS does not act often that it does not 
have teeth.   The reality most FOSS developers know they have the teeth to put 
a company out of business so try negotiation.

https://libav.org/shame.html  you will notice all the ones here are fairly much 
software companies.  Developers don't have very effective teeth to go after 
software companies.  Also remember even if the infringement is preformed by a 
sub-company the fact its on your device can make that device destroyable and 
you will be expected to get the compensation out the sub company that provided 
you with the infringing software.

The reality is you are better to break patent law than trademark or copyright 
as hardware company.

Something Allwinner take on board is release the source after the fact is an 
extremely bad idea.   If you go to Intel and Amd you will notice they release 
the open source code before the chip ship.   This means the chips cannot be 
destroyed at customs.   You are only able to catch up with the source release 
after the fact because at this stage the FOSS developers are being kind.

Siarhei Siamashka the case of the firmware not using the Linux kernel firmware 
loader what promises that we will not have that happen again.  Is there staff 
training to make sure this does not happen again.

Siarhei Siamashka there are compliance tools.
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/programs/legal/compliance/tools
Are you using them.  If not please start using them.   If you are using them 
please open bug reports for the cases that these issues got missed.

http://www.binaryanalysis.org/en/home

This tool is built particularly to allow FOSS developers to locate infringement 
in closed source binaries.   Basically FOSS developers have tools to find 
infringement and they have made the tools for your side to detect infringement 
before it gets out the door.   Please allwinner stop messing with them because 
when they do decide to hit it is going to hurt.   I like your chips don't want 
to have the case that I have ordered something only to find its been crushed 
because you were infringing.

Basically due to the tools it would have taken Luc Verhaegen bugger all effort 
to find the issue.   Since it takes bugger all effort why did not the allwinner 
staff locate it.   Maybe they are not tooled up correctly and maybe this is the 
cause of all the on going issues.

If you can prove a fault with the FOSS compliance tool that it failed to detect 
it at least you have workable excuse and evidence that you attempted to be 
conforming but this still does not help you if developer has chosen to go the 
customs path to copyright enforcement.   

The best option is do not infringe and if you do don't just play it down have 
some decent explanation in a form of an operational failure of something or 
someone at least then the FOSS developers finding the problems walk way kind of 
ok and are unlikely to take it further.

Peter Dolding

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"linux-sunxi" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Reply via email to