Nothing will come of this. Who will bother to sue?
http://gpl-violations.org/ when it was still around (seems defunct since November 2014?).
Allwinner GPL violations
41–50 of 82 posts
Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#42Always 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.
How does it 'hurt sharing?' Maybe in the most trivial sense. The original code is still out there.
How does not paying for works not hurt sharing? If return on investment on works is being hurt then that's a demotivator for future works. Monument Valley had something like a 95% pirating rate on Android. That affects the expectations of indie devs and investors. Brushing this under the carpet doesn't change the facts.
If pirating was more under control, we'd see more innovation and top notch applications in the Android market. Instead, we see all the top notch applications go to iOS either exclusively or only to Android after they've made money on iOS and then publishers decide to push out a port because its just going to get pirated anyway. The difference between these two ecosystems is proof enough that pirating games hurts innovation, companies, and customers.
Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#43Always interesting to see people's reactions to copyright for GPL Code vs Music/Movies/Games.
They are totally different. The way Music/Movies work usually it's "don't f-ing share this, you need permission".
The GPL is "we require that you share and provide freedoms to others"
In other words, copyright is usually used to block people from being good sharing neighbors. GPL requires sharing. Not sharing is wrong. So, copyright for music is against the natural tendency to be a good neighbor and people rightly blame the copyright restrictions for being awful. GPL violations means you are both infringing copyright and being a bad citizen, bad neighbor.
Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#44Allwinner 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_s…
Freescale isn't Chinese.
Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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_s…
Freescale isn't Chinese.
True. Sorry to misread the parent post.
Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#46Seems 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…
Because it's lots of work and you get nothing really in return.
What you want is code that you can commit back into your reposority but what you get is some code that is quickly hacked together and you don't even want to look at.
Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How does it 'hurt sharing?' Maybe in the most trivial sense. The original code is still out there. How does not paying for works not hurt sharing? If return on investment on works is being hurt then that's a demotivator for future works. Monument Valley had something like a 95% pirating rate on Android. That affects the expectations of indie devs and investors. Brushing this under the carpet doesn't change the facts.…
The usual argument for how nonGPL hurts sharing is that people write improvements to the open work that the original release cannot replicate, thus outperforming it. This causes people to use different (closed-source) works on different platforms, fragmenting the community and hurting sharing.
Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#48Seems 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, a…
Where did the GPL-enforcing lawyer come from? How did the lawyer get paid? For the people who wanted monetary damages, did they ever actually get significant monetary damages, or were the money claims dropped in exchange for compliance in the settlement process?
Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#49Always interesting to see people's reactions to copyright for GPL Code vs Music/Movies/Games.
They are totally different. The way Music/Movies work usually it's "don't f-ing share this, you need permission". The GPL is "we require that you share and provide freedoms to others" In other words, copyright is usually used to block people from being good sharing neighbors. GPL requires sharing. Not sharing is wrong. So, copyright for music is against the natural tendency to be a good neighbor and people rightly bl…
Not everyone shares your particular idea of what a bad and good citizen is.
Re: Allwinner GPL violations
#50Allwinner 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 have to disagree here a bit as well. Allwinner has really helped open up RockChip code as well.
For instance, the vpu kernel driver (GPL license) is now open: https://github.com/omegamoon/rockchip-rk30xx-mk808/blob/mast...
And the libstagefright (includes libvpu) as Apache license: https://github.com/HermanChen/Rockchip_4.2_release_libstagef...
The Mali GPU driver is still stuck in proprietary limbo though, AFAIK. Rockchip can't release the code without ARM's permission, and ARM has only released partial support as of now. They claim that it's working, though I am still trying to get a complete X11/Wayland driver running myself (mostly due to all the android dependencies which I don't need under pure Linux)
http://community.arm.com/message/21331 http://malideveloper.arm.com/develop-for-mali/drivers/open-s...
So things are getting better, though there is still some wide gaping holes in development.