Allwinner GPL violations
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Allwinner GPL violations
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Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#2Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#3This makes me think of Bunnie's "From Gongkai to Open Source":
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297
And the general lack of compatibility between western and eastern models of imaginary property.
In this example allwinner is applying the eastern "share, modify, pass around" model, which isn't compatible with the western model of strict license adherence.
In Bunnie's case they're trying to adapt hardware/software developed with no apparent western-style license to a functional project.
Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#4This makes me think of Bunnie's "From Gongkai to Open Source": http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297 And the general lack of compatibility between western and eastern models of imaginary property. In this example allwinner is applying the eastern "share, modify, pass around" model, which isn't compatible with the western model of strict license adherence. In Bunnie's case they're trying to adapt hardware/software…
(a) They are not sharing the source at all. (b) Don't apologise for a huge company operating worldwide and breaking the law.
Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#5What recourse does one have against a Chinese company? Has anyone ever shown the GPL to have weight in China?
Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#6What recourse does one have against a Chinese company? Has anyone ever shown the GPL to have weight in China?
They sell worldwide. Allwinner are the leading supplier of SoCs for tablets, and are especially popular in "second tier" tablets and phones. All those tablets you see for sale in shops that aren't iPads, but have strange unknown names and sell for $150 - they will have AllWinner-designed chips* and AllWinner-compiled kernels/userspace full of binary blobs. So you can go after that.
It's a real shame because their SoCs are cheap, powerful and very popular amongst Linux/ARM hobbyists - see http://linux-sunxi.org/Category:Devices
* Well, AllWinner cut and paste ARM cores together. I wonder if ARM have this much trouble with licensing too?
Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#7What recourse does one have against a Chinese company? Has anyone ever shown the GPL to have weight in China?
IANAL, but I'd say the best bet would be to sue them in the US/Europe and try to get an injunction banning their products, much like the movie industry got DVDFab's domains and funds seized.
Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#8Seems like pretty blatant and long-lived violations. Anybody know why somebody doesn't take them to court and try to get an import ban, monetary damages, or both?
If the punishment for blatantly violating the GPL or LGPL for years at a time while raking in millions of dollars in profits is getting bitched at on the internet, it seems likely to me that a lot of companies will do the cost-benefit analysis and decide that GPL compliance isn't really worth the hassle.
Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#9This makes me think of Bunnie's "From Gongkai to Open Source": http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297 And the general lack of compatibility between western and eastern models of imaginary property. In this example allwinner is applying the eastern "share, modify, pass around" model, which isn't compatible with the western model of strict license adherence. In Bunnie's case they're trying to adapt hardware/software…
They appear to be doing "take, modify, distribute as a compiled binary blob that no one else can modify and pass around". It's hard to reconcile that with the word "share".
Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#10Nothing will come of this. Who will bother to sue?