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Allwinner GPL violations

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Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#31

Post by srathbun »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #26
phkahler wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright violation carries heavy penalties these days, particularly in the US. If you can prove it, get a lawyer to work on contingency. IANAL but this seems easy.

It carries heavy penalties for large players with on-staff or retained legal firms. For the rest of us, you can forget about it (source: multiple lawyers, none of whom would work on contingency for a case like this). I can absolutely prove it, but it doesn't matter. At least I got them to stop but not before they'd passed off my software as someone else's to millions.

That's a shame. I've used portableApps and it is a nice piece of software.

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#32

Post by paulv »

scott00 wrote: post #8

Seems 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 th…

I can't speak to this particular incident, but I have helped with the technical aspects of GPL copyright enforcement, almost exclusively on embedded devices (routers, TVs, blu-ray players, etc). The copyright holders didn't always want money (I'd guess more than 50% did, though) and they all, always, wanted compliance with the license.

It was definitely made clear to the offenders that they would be taken to court, and at that point most of them opted to settle. For those that didn't, the court stuff was mostly uneventful. The judge would tell them they had to comply with the license, they would either stonewall or give us a (usually non-working) dump of their code & build system, ad infinitum, until we told them we were going to ask the judge for an injunction. That was usually sufficient motivation.

The reason there are no court cases is because we had them dead to rights and their lawyers knew it. Their lawyers told them there was no point in fighting, and to just give us what we wanted.

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#33

Post by p8952 »

dubya wrote: post #30
oracle2025 wrote: post #29

They only people who may complain about those violations are the copyrightholders of the code that has been violated. Everyone else who is chiming in here and bashing the offender is IMHO suffering from some kind of torches and pitchforks mob mentality. GPL violations as far as I understand it are always a matter to be settled between the original authors and the offenders. I am not aware that the GPL gives bystander…

I don't know of the legal status, but I believe the GPL originated when Stallman and others wanted access to the source code for the drivers of a printer. Anyone who uses the software, which is anyone who uses the hardware, should have standing to demand the code.

The history is correct. However the enforcement comes between the author of the code and the distributor.

The author(A) allows the distributor(D) to distribute their(A) code so long as they(D) provide the source plus any modifications to the recipient.

The recipient has no right to demand the code due to there being no agreement to provide it between the distributor and the recipient.

So the author, on behalf of the recipient, must be the one to enforce the conditions of the agreement they made with the distributor.

In cases involving projects like Linux or BusyBox this can be anyone who has committed code, as these projects do not require copyright assignment.

In cases involving projects like GNU and Ubuntu all committed code is owned by the parent organization, the FSF and Canonical respectively. So they are the only ones who can enforce the GPL.

That said, the end user can report violations to groups like The Software Freedom Law Center and GPL-Violations.org. These groups have contacts to various copyright holders and will assist with enforcing them on a pro bono basis.

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#34

Post by click170 »

oracle2025 wrote: post #29

They only people who may complain about those violations are the copyrightholders of the code that has been violated. Everyone else who is chiming in here and bashing the offender is IMHO suffering from some kind of torches and pitchforks mob mentality. GPL violations as far as I understand it are always a matter to be settled between the original authors and the offenders. I am not aware that the GPL gives bystander…

We don't have the right to sue, but we have the right to help the original author(s) sue by providing funds for a legal challenge.

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#36

Post by Narishma »

lfam wrote: post #15

Allwinner's SOCs are popular as Raspberry Pi-ish single-board computers for hobbyist Linux users who want a dirt-cheap home server. What are some alternatives that have better track records with the GPL?

Raspberry Pi.

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#37

Post by TorKlingberg »

rwmj wrote: post #6
bhouston wrote: post #5

What 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 SoC…

> I wonder if ARM have this much trouble with licensing too?

As far as I know, no. To actually produce chips Allwinner and others have to go through one of a small number of fabs. TSMC, Globalfoundries, UMC and Samsung will not make chips with pirated blocks.

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#38

Post by joezydeco »

ausjke wrote: post #19

Allwinner is the rare, if not the only SOC ARM chip vendor, from China that sort of embraced Linux/GPL/LGPL in a public way to some extent. The rest of those similar companies does pretty much nothing meaningful at all, they use Linux too, just no public release whatsoever. In that sense, it's the least evil as far as GPL violation goes.

I'll have to disagree there.

Freescale does an excellent job of putting all of their stuff up on Github. The iMX6 family is a joy to work with thanks to their efforts.

https://github.com/freescale

They also go above and beyond with documentation. No NDA/MDA needed. Tens of thousands of pages of freely available technical reference including the entire TRMs for the SoCs:

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?co...

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#39

Post by tspiteri »

ksk wrote: post #35

Always interesting to see people's reactions to copyright for GPL Code vs Music/Movies/Games.

What is interesting about comparing reactions to GPL copyright against music copyright? Without saying that either of the two copyright cases is right/wrong, there are major differences. In GPL copyright violation, the violation hinders sharing. In music copyright violation, the violation usually helps sharing. So the comparison is a bit meaningless.

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#40

Post by arcatek »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #22
scott00 wrote: post #8

Seems 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 th…

The simple answer is "because money". It costs quite a bit to be able to do any of that. And that's not something most open source projects or developers can come anywhere close to affording. Source: I run PortableApps.com and have had my GPL software used illegally by competing projects in other countries as well as at least one Fortune 500 here in the states.

You made PortableApps ? I used it like seven years ago, and it was great - it helped me and a few others to learn programming on our school computers which, as you might guess, didn't have a lot of tools dedicated to that purpose.
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