On Wed, 4 Mar 2015 19:56:53 -0800 (PST)
[email protected] wrote:
> I think we need to bring this back to simple.
Thanks for sharing your opinion. But first of all, please start
playing by the rules yourself. This is a technical mailing used by
free software developers. And the subscribers are expected to
respect "Proper conduct", as explained in the linux-sunxi wiki:
http://linux-sunxi.org/Mailing_list
Which means making sure that you don't violate:
http://linux.sgms-centre.com/misc/netiquette.php
And in particular, the "Make sure your lines are no longer than 72 to
76 characters in length" rule.
> 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.
As a matter of fact, Allwinner does not make devices. It makes chips.
It is the Allwinner's customers who are making devices. And the unique
situation with (at least older) Allwinner based devices is that these
devices can be running 100% free software. Very few other hardware
vendors are able to match this level of freedom (even Intel based
devices are typically shipping with proprietary BIOS firmware).
And by the way, I'm not sure if you paid attention to the discussion in
this thread, but there is also a reverse engineered hardware video
decoder implementation available, which is 100% free software. This
means that you don't really need to use any blobs from Allwinner to
play your video.
And to complement the perfect software freedom, some of the device
manufacturers are even making open source hardware (if you have
ever heard about this concept). For example, you can check
https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/open-source-hardware
> 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.
The SoC chips obviously do not contain the kernel code or userland
software.
> You are only able to catch up with the source release after the
> fact because at this stage the FOSS developers are being kind.
Look, you have blatantly violated the netiquette rules in this
mailing list. And now you are only able to catch up with the rules
after the fact. The ignorant people like you can only get away with
their misconduct because the free software developers here are being
kind. Just be grateful that nobody suggests to get you banned yet.
> 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.
How can we be sure that your violation of the netiquette rules will
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.
Are you now telling me to do your homework? But this is not how free
software development works. Don't just come here with a consumer
attitude. We (free software developers) owe you nothing. Please start
using these tools yourself and submit issues at github if you are
really interested in improving Allwinner's licenses compliance. Thanks
in advance for your cooperation.
> 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.
Yes, I believe that everyone sincerely wants to do the right thing.
However you, for example, are not familiar with the netiquette rules,
because they are probably not something that is common in your
environment. And in a similar way, Allwinner is probably not very
familiar with software licenses too (but I don't want to be making
any statements on their behalf). The point is that people do make
mistakes sometimes. But much more important is what efforts are
made to fix these mistakes whenever they happen.
Now going back to the current situation with Allwinner and the
software support. Previously the SDK had been only provided to the
device manufacturers (probably under NDA). Parts of these SDK releases
sometimes got leaked to the public, but Allwinner never officially
distributed them to the end users and instead delegated this
responsibility to the device manufacturers. In a way, this was a
legal loophole.
I should also mention the reason why we have a nearly perfect free
software support for the A10/A13/A20 SoC variants now. A major role
in this had been played by Tom Cubie, who used to be an Allwinner
employee at that time. Tom actively communicated with the community,
was available on the IRC channel and also helped to get proper GPL
license notices and Allwinner copyrights added the leaked SDK sources,
effectively making them legal to use by the free software community.
Also, if I remember correctly, the kernel binary blobs used on A10
were open sourced too. That was a perfect example of proper
cooperation. Later Tom Cubie left Allwinner to create his own
company, which produced excellent Cubieboard development boards
and further contributed to the popularity of A10/A20 chips.
But after Tom Cubie left Allwinner, their cooperation with the
linux-sunxi community gradually went downhill. It reached the
lowest point right after Allwinner had joined Linaro, when all
the contacts seemed to get abruptly cut off and Allwinner seemed
to have stopped responding to the e-mails from some linux-sunxi
community members. The exact role of Linaro and what do they
actually bring to the table still remains unclear.
However recently Allwinner has created a project at github with
the documentation releases:
https://github.com/allwinner-zh/
And also apparently hired David Lanzendörfer to take care of the
communication with the linux-sunxi community:
https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg10021.html
I don't know if David Lanzendörfer can really replace Tom Cubie
and do the same (or better) job, but this looks like a positive
change overall and I can only welcome it.
Also Allwinner has recently started releasing the kernel, bootloader
and some other software to the same project at github. Yes, they are
making some mistakes in the process of doing this, but they are
also responding to the requests in the issue tracker and trying to
resolve them. Surely this looks a bit awkward and the licenses
compliance could have been handled better by avoiding some basic
mistakes. As the others have already mentioned in this discussion
thread, the most interesting question is why Linaro is not supervising
this process? Wasn't Linaro supposed to improve the Allwinner's open
source situation (and is probably even getting paid for that)?
--
Best regards,
Siarhei Siamashka
--
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.
