Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Allwinner GPL violations

groups.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 82 posts

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#71

Post by tracker1 »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #51
arcatek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Glad you liked it. We're still going strong. A larger percentage of our users these days now use it either locally or on a synced cloud folder. Our platform installer even detects and offers to install to Dropbox, Box, One Drive and Google Drive.

That's awesome, I've got a few things in my dropbox like that... makes it a lot easier even for those bits that I add to my windows path.

For Linux and OSX, it would be cool to see similar things.. though I've seen some interesting things using Dropbox that may yeild a portable *nix app solution one day.

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#72

Post by tracker1 »

ksk wrote: post #54
tspiteri wrote: post #39

Earlier 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.

The original piece of code is left unchanged. The author can share it as much as they want. You certainly can ask people if they want to share their own work. You can't take it for granted that people have a moral obligation to share the products of their labor. People might say if you don't agree with the license "then stop using GPL code", similar to how someone might say "then stop using copyrighted music/movies/g…

But the people who modified the author's code didn't comply with the terms of use for that code... they took something and didn't "pay" for it... the price in terms of GPL and licensing code isn't money, but it is still payment. If a company doesn't want to pay for code that they take, they should write it all themselves or take code that doesn't require payment... GPL requires payment of including modified sources with redistribution.

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#73

Post by ksk »

tracker1 wrote: post #72
ksk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original piece of code is left unchanged. The author can share it as much as they want. You certainly can ask people if they want to share their own work. You can't take it for granted that people have a moral obligation to share the products of their labor. People might say if you don't agree with the license "then stop using GPL code", similar to how someone might say "then stop using copyrighted music/movies/g…

But the people who modified the author's code didn't comply with the terms of use for that code... they took something and didn't "pay" for it... the price in terms of GPL and licensing code isn't money, but it is still payment. If a company doesn't want to pay for code that they take, they should write it all themselves or take code that doesn't require payment... GPL requires payment of including modified sources w…

You may have missed my first post. I understand all that. My point was the that people show differing attitudes to violating copyright when it comes to the GPL vs. Movies/Music/etc.

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#74

Post by ksk »

chc wrote: post #67
ksk wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're wrong. It's more a sense of amusement than anything else. I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm neither a GPL fan, nor a supporter of Copyright law as-is.

My apologies, then. I read it as the common Internet usage of "always interesting" where it means "I think this is completely stupid."

Well its certainly not stupid, I just thought that people have their own biases towards copyright law when it comes to GPL violations vs pirating Music/Movies/etc.

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#75

Post by yellowapple »

ksk wrote: post #57
yellowapple wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure a significant majority would agree that generosity is an important trait for a good citizen, however. An unwillingness to share makes someone look more like an asshole.

A programmer deciding not to share the fruits of their own labor does NOT make them an asshole. The thread is about Copyright and GPL code, not everything-in-the-entire-world-that-can-be-shared.

I said "look like", not "be". I'm sure there are plenty of closed-source programmers who really are nice people who rescue puppies from trees and bake cupcakes for school fundraisers, but that doesn't change the fact that answering the question of "Hey, would you be interested in opening up the source code of your program to the public so that people can help you write it and have some way of knowing that your program doesn't have code that sets my hard drive on fire after selling all my personal information to Latvian potato farmers?" with an unwavering "No fscking way", it's pretty understandable that the people who would instead answer "Of course!" would have an impression of that programmer being selfish or perhaps even outright malicious.

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#76

Post by anonbanker »

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 have full documentation and a working kernel source for rockchip rk3x88 chips.

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#77

Post by cmdrfred »

arcatek wrote: post #40
JohnTHaller wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same here, love portable apps. Used it for the same reason at my old job. Was able to teach myself enough to get a system admin gig.

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#78

Post by khuey »

pseudonom- wrote: post #70
khuey wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, because the sunxi community formed and did all the work.

Yeah, I didn't mean that as an endorsement of Allwinner. Just a potentially useful piece of information.

Allwinner boards are quite nice if you want to run mainline Linux on ARM. I've got an A20 based board for that myself.

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#79

Post by JohnTHaller »

tracker1 wrote: post #71
JohnTHaller wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you liked it. We're still going strong. A larger percentage of our users these days now use it either locally or on a synced cloud folder. Our platform installer even detects and offers to install to Dropbox, Box, One Drive and Google Drive.

That's awesome, I've got a few things in my dropbox like that... makes it a lot easier even for those bits that I add to my windows path. For Linux and OSX, it would be cool to see similar things.. though I've seen some interesting things using Dropbox that may yeild a portable *nix app solution one day.

You can run them on Linux via Wine and on OS X via Crossover, Wineskin, etc. We check for running via Wine in our tools and work around a few bugs where we can.

Re: Allwinner GPL violations

#80

Post by JohnTHaller »

cmdrfred wrote: post #77
arcatek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same here, love portable apps. Used it for the same reason at my old job. Was able to teach myself enough to get a system admin gig.

Glad it helped you out. I'm still amazed at the number of folks the apps and utilities helped over the years. And a number of our devs use the experience they gain towards getting a spot at university or a job as well.
Post reply on HN