Hi Henrik, On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 10:33 AM, Henrik Nordström <[email protected]> wrote: > fre 2015-06-26 klockan 01:12 +1000 skrev Julian Calaby: >> >> It's obvious what is required: >> 1. Datasheets >> 2. Programming manuals >> 3. GPL compliant drivers >> 4. (L)GPL compliant userspace stuff > >> and maybe >> >> 5. Some on-going contribution to the community > > And > > 6. That community uses and improves the free alternatives developed by > the community instead of encouraging further bad actions in paths that > is unlikely to ever result in anything meeting the broad community > goals. > >> They have #1 and #2 but aren't bothering to release them to us. > > I honestly do not believe they have any better manuals or datasheets > than released. They have tons of other internal information (notes, CPU > source code, talking with the person who wrote the CPU parts, etc)
I'd actually forgotten about their documentation github repository when I wrote this, so I retract this point. They've gotten much better at releasing documentation. I believe the only thing they haven't directly released is documentation for the R8. >> I believe most of the documentation we have has been obtained through >> third parties. > > In past yes kind of.. but now we have > https://github.com/allwinner-zh/documents/ Which had slipped my mind. Sigh. >> #3 is almost happening, but with just about every code >> release, there's something in there violating the licence. > > Community have also come very far in making clean GPL drivers for most > components, including CedarX. Oh, definitely. Cedarus appears to be as complete, if not more complete than their official drivers. The mainline drivers I've seen appear to be better than what Allwinner produces in almost every way. My point here is that this is due to the community's efforts, not Allwinner's. >> We're >> arguing over their lack of ability on #4 and their employees (with >> the >> possible exception of Kevin, who pops up every so often to announce >> something) are absent from the community. This isn't hard, there are >> thousands of companies doing it. > > No, we are arguing over AW repeatedly doing the same licensing > mistakes. Which makes the stuff they release not (L)GPL compliant. As I see it, this is the same thing, just stated differently, but then I take an absolutist view on licence compliance. > Absense from the community is not strange. From a community perspective > it would be very desireable that AW employees were more active in the > community, but I fully understand that this is not an easy task to > accomplish. Most AW employees have access to internal information, and > likely bound by restrictions in both contract and cultural difference. I understand that it's difficult, however a lot of companies have succeeded in this. My knowledge of this is mostly from the WiFi subsystem where the entire community is (for the most part) lead by people employed by Intel, Qualcomm and Broadcom. Yes, they are huge companies and Allwinner is tiny in comparison, but I'm not expecting them to run our community here, all I'm hoping for someone who'll essentially be a gateway between Allwinner corporate and us. Even if they just pass out documentation, snippets of code and answer technical questions promptly, (or if they can't answer them, explain why) that'll be enough. Kevin appears to be doing most of that, but he's not very active. Thanks, -- Julian Calaby Email: [email protected] Profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/julian.calaby/ -- 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.
