On Tue, 22 Sep 2015 11:09:23 +0200 Andreas Baierl <[email protected]> wrote: > I recognized, that there has already been done some basic (and more > or less complete) work on each of that tasks by different developers. > I won't list the names, involved people know them, and something > is/was listed in our wiki, too. > In summary the basic question is, if these developers intend to > finish their work at sometime or plan to share their efforts. If not, > what are the reasons, why this seems to be "paused". Personal mood, > Allwinner, payment, time? Is there anything that can be done by the > community to help?
Well, where should this start? Is oblivious that the problem is not technical. You and others already know some of this story, but this is a very delicate matter that without the complete picture of the events, some of the new people that just joined (sunxi) will think as bizarre some of the behavior and decisions taken. To not get (again) be "accused" of not working "hard" enough, there must be caution in how to describe this situation. To do so, some context is need and if not clear enough, please make questions. Sorry to repeat all the same things, that we all would prefer not to get involved in (if we had the choice). My version of events, in the video engine context only. (correction welcome if any thing is not the right truth) - somehow, allwinner publish the A10 kernel/bootloader source code, that triggers the formation of the linux-sunxi community, as that was so uncommon for a Chinese arm soc vendor. - lot of interest around the allwinner socs, including some developers of a popular media player, that with allwinner cooperation worked to add hardware decoding support. But. After some time, those same developers unsatisfied by the level of cooperation given by allwinner, ceased all the work. This was the event that made the allwinner-proprietary-driver-library have bad reputation, equal to a piece of manure. (which is not full deserved, is true that proprietary-driver-library had/has some problems, but other than that, it works.)(only is need some willing to spend the time to make it work.) - people started to think about reverse-engineering. as is what happens when there is hardware that one what to use, but the software side is "limiting" said use. But unfortunately, this first try didn't achieve the momentum need. - some months later, the wish to reverse-engineering reemerged again, this time with more people (which i am one of them) - after some weeks (around a month or so), came to light the existence of multiple license violations in the proprietary-driver-libraries, (multiple, because wasn't only a L(GPL) violation) - but, as we all were so happy and hopeful of allwinner that appeared to be following and doing the right thing. Together with the finding that the video engine hardware was easy to reserse-engineering. We just chosen to not go bother allwinner about this, and ignore the license violations. Looking back, i am now of opinion that this was a huge mistake. - a year passed, and with the new A80 soc, massive license violations emerged, together with an difficulty to communicate with allwinner, and its close board vendor (cubieboard) - at this point the discussions (mainly in the irc) of this situation, referred to again this video-engine proprietary-driver-library license violations At this point i believe that allwinner was contacted about the existence of this license violations, and was given (to allwinner) a solution in which all sides ended as all winner, a solution that if allwinner had chosen to accept would not required that this license violations be made public. This happened to my best knowledge around july/june of 2014, as i was not involved in this dialog, dont know its date. At this point, we all know what happened, and is not need specific in detail. Allwinner did not choose to collaborate with the linux-sunxi community, instead allwinner came into this community expecting that we, this open-source community accept a proprietary-driver-library with such unacceptable license violations. At the face of this, we can not stay silence. But you may ask, why is important that this license violations in the proprietary-driver-library be resolved, if we prefer to reverse-engineering and to work to write a fully 100% open-source-driver. The unwillingness of allwinner to resolve or to dialogue with the community to find a solution, creates uncertain about the future. Will allwinner respect the license of this new driver written by this community? This is a question that i personally would like to be answered. As i am well aware that media-playback bring certain business strategies in which an open-source driver is unwanted. I refuse to be *alone* in the writing of any driver, because i don't want to be *alone* in the likelihood of having to remember that license violations aren't acceptable. Next would be about the random board vendors and its users, that talk about open-source and desire to have hardware accelerated media-playback which for them open-source is only for marketing, and that do nothing to support this community. But by writing all this, is enough to get in bad mood, so i end here. As i would prefer to spend my time in technical matters that keeping rewind the same tape. -- Manuel Braga -- 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.
