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Liliputing reports:
Chinese chip maker Allwinner has joined the Linux Foundation as part of an effort to improve its relationship with the open source community.
While you can run Ubuntu and other Linux-based software on many tablets and TV boxes with Allwinner chips, the company has a history of violating GPL by failing to make source code available.
The company's involvement with the Linux Foundation could help change that. Maybe.
A few years ago developers discovered they could get Ubuntu and other Linux-based software to run on devices like the Mele A1000 and Rikomagic MK802, which helped make these mini PCs popular with folks looking for more than a simple TV box.
There's even a Sunxi Linux community dedicated to developing open source software for products with Allwinner processors. But the community has called out Allwinner for numerous GPL violations.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Informative) by JNCF on Tuesday June 16 2015, @06:29PM
There is a recently completed kickstarter for a $9 linux board that uses the next allwinner chip. The company behind the kickstarter made this post: [kickstarter.com]
Binary Blobs, GPL Violations and Moving Forward
As members of the open source community, we take license violations very seriously. We've had a productive and active dialog with our friends at Allwinner about the GPL violations present in the released CedarX drivers and are commited to helping them resolve the issues.
Allwinner's engineers have already spent hundreds of hours doing static analysis to locate and repair GPL violating components of their drivers, and are continuing to dig through, line by line. It's a time-consuming process complicated by intellectual property restrictions inherent in the SoC business.
Allwinner's most recent code release addresses GPL violations in three ways:
New code architecture: Driver has been split into several plugins, one plugin per video format.
GPL-compliant: We have scanned and analyzed the code to ensure that there is no GPL code used or called.
Partial CedarX video decoder source code release: MPEG2, MPEG4, MJPEG, and H264 drivers source code available.
There is a long road ahead, but we're extremely excited at the progress made already, and the good-faith effort shown by partners on all sides.
Ultimately, our goal is to have as few binary blobs present in the source tree required to use C.H.I.P. as possible. Presently, binary blobs are required for 3 parts of the R8 SoC software stack:
ARM Mali 400 Driver (3D graphics acceleration)
C2D (2D acceleration)
CedarX (Video Hardware Encoding/Decoding)
Our plan is to mainline support for user-space drivers for these binary blobs. But we're also actively exploring ways that we can eliminate the need for these binary blobs altogether. We will also provide Chipsters who want a completely FOSS C.H.I.P. OS builds that are blob-free!
I'm just sharing information, not defending any corporations.