Hello, On 25 June 2015 at 11:56, 'Simos Xenitellis' via linux-sunxi <[email protected]> wrote:
> The way I see the whole situation is this: It is true that Allwinner > did not make effort over the years > for mainline Linux kernel support. Whatever support is there for the > A10, A13, A20, etc, > is the result of the hard work of this community. Working on mainline > support is initially expensive > in terms of resources but builds an ecosystem and opens up markets. It > makes business sense. > > As a community, we need to figure out what we need from Allwinner. > Do we need specific SoC information so that we do the mainline effort > on our own? And among all things that can be asked, > we prioritize to those that are really needed at the moment. > Do we need Allwinner to fund some developers so that they work > full-time on this? We would need to start talking about goals and > targets. > The goal in general is to get enough information and/or opensource properly licensed code to run GNU/Linux and *BSD on the allwinner SoCs with full feature support on current and future versions of these systems. Given that we have reverse-engineered documentation for Cedar there is really not much technical benefit in Allwinner releasing the Cedar driver source with proper licensing so it can be reused as-is. It might be mere convenience to reuse some of the code. On the other hand, given the documentation exists there is little reason for Allwinner to pretend there are secrets protected by not releasing the code. There is also legal obligation to release the source of the binaries of ffmepg which is (L)GPL even after adding the proprietary bits. That said the ffmpeg author(s) do not seem to press the legal issue. Overall the Cedar discussion is pretty much pointless. It only restarts for no good when somebody (from Allwinner or otherwise) points at the repo and says "Look, allwinner released the Cedar sources" and then there is half of the implementation or binary blob. So to say it clearly: To fulfill the legal obligations to the letter allwinner has to release the full source under (L)GPL compatible license of all the Cedar codec binaries it released in the past since it has been pointed out that these binaries contain substantial portions of ffmpeg which is (L)GPL licensed. Using (L)GPL code brings this obligation. To fulfill the obligation in spirit without possibly infringing on license of some third party proprietary modules linked into said ffmpeg binaries Allwinner could release an alternative fully opensource and (L)GPL compatible codec implementing all the features of those binaries. Given that this isn't really needed for the goal of getting full support for Allwinner SoCs I personally do not really care if such thing happens or not. It might change for future revisions of the codec with new features, though. Thanks Michal -- 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.
