Allwinner Continues Jerking Around The Open-Source Community

[chrisb]

Well if we don't like it no problem, we can always ask the Chinese folks to do something about these companies. If the Chinese don't take any drastic measures we can just ban imports from China, right ... errr ... we can, right ?

Actually that's exactly what could happen. In the U.S., the International Trade Commission has the power to ban imports as a penalty for copyright infringement. All infringing devices using Allwinner chips could potentially be banned.

It seems like it should be pretty trivial to find an infringing device and sue the manufacturers and importers, if any copyright holder can be bothered...

[erendorn]

What exactly are they making worse, if no action is taken against it.
Absolutely nothing, because they can do whatever they want in that case.

That's what I don't get. If they fear nothing, why take steps to hide stuff? If they fear a lawsuit, why take step to clumsily hide evidence?
Looks like retarded steps to take to me.

[droidhacker]

That's what I don't get. If they fear nothing, why take steps to hide stuff? If they fear a lawsuit, why take step to clumsily hide evidence?
Looks like retarded steps to take to me.

That really is the funny thing, isn't it? They are implementing this process SO poorly, that almost seems like sabotage -- maybe someone in there is TRYING to force change by proving how horrible things are.
On the other hand, their hardware and software (they stuff *they* implement, not the stuff they STOLE) is just so terrible, that it may just be a case of clear cut incompetence.

[stevenc]

GPL was a great idea, but forgets that law only really works in favour of corporate monopoly anyway. They can't be beaten at their own game. And some of the scariest establishments operate beyond the reach of any law (intelligence agencies or foreign governments, using derivatives of GPL SNORT for deep packet inspection for example).

OTOH, the GPL does scare nice people away from using free software, because properly complying sound complex, or the reach of the GPL into their own software is unclear, and they're not experts in law.

[chrisb]

GPL was a great idea, but forgets that law only really works in favour of corporate monopoly anyway

Thousands of copyright cases have been won by non-corporate-monopoly people. It's not that hard - your copyright gets infringed, you go to court and show it, you win. But you might need to pay for a lawyer.

The general lack of enforcement when open source software is pirated is due to:

• Infringement is often outside the jurisdiction of the author's national courts
• Authors of open source works are nicer/less profit motivated than for-profit corporate entities. They generally first highlight compliance issues rather than suing. The stated aim of every notable open source enforcement group has been to bring infringers into compliance - not to make money. e.g. The Software Freedom Conservancy only ask for the costs that they incur helping the infringer become compliant - there is no "$millions of penalties x Triple damage awards" as would be the norm for a corporate entity.

[stevenc]

• Authors of open source works are nicer/less profit motivated than for-profit corporate entities. They generally first highlight compliance issues rather than suing. The stated aim of every notable open source enforcement group has been to bring infringers into compliance - not to make money. e.g. The Software Freedom Conservancy only ask for the costs that they incur helping the infringer become compliant - there is no "$millions of penalties x Triple damage awards" as would be the norm for a corporate entity.

So the act of writing and freely licensing software is not enough; it requires more charity and yet more lawyers in order to enforce it.

If enforcement is anything less than total, you're giving a commercial advantage to bad people and cheats, whilst prevent some amount of nice folks from using your code in some ways. I believe if useful code was put out into the world without legal restrictions we might be able to move onto more important issues. I'll agree to disagree with anyone on this.

[duby229]

Well if we don't like it no problem, we can always ask the Chinese folks to do something about these companies. If the Chinese don't take any drastic measures we can just ban imports from China, right ... errr ... we can, right ?

Oh boy! Ban imports from china. I'm not sure that could work totally. Maybe partially. Too many things are made in china. At least in the US we are totally unprepared for that.

[Nille]

Why from china? we talk only about chips. Its not to hard to ban affected chips from from the import. If they cant sell the chips in the EU or US, i bet they change there minds.

[chrisb]

So the act of writing and freely licensing software is not enough; it requires more charity and yet more lawyers in order to enforce it.

If enforcement is anything less than total, you're giving a commercial advantage to bad people and cheats, whilst prevent some amount of nice folks from using your code in some ways. I believe if useful code was put out into the world without legal restrictions we might be able to move onto more important issues. I'll agree to disagree with anyone on this.

Enforcement is always less than total. Go and look at Pirate Bay or any of the torrent sites and you will find a shocking amount of pirated content. Yes, we could have the government declare everything public domain, and effectively make piracy legal so that we can move onto more important issues, but there are some obvious arguments against that.

[caligula]

I firmly believe that Allwinner's (alltaker's?) consistent abuse of the GPL should earn them lawsuits, at least in the US and EU.

In the EU it might even be possible that the protection of the GPL could be considered an issue of common good and some kind of a formal EU response could be mustered. There are various projects across the European Union contributing open-sourced code.

Strengthening GPL's legal standing would be in everyone's interest, excepting a small number of moral-free corporations and China's ruling elite who profit from their freewheeling exporters.

In fact China's communist rulers might even sort out Allwinner internally if continued bad media publicity exceeds their calculated tolerance.

Um GPL *is* a communist license so it should be quite compatible with chinese company politics. I mean theyre just stealing, not selling the software so thats hardly different from GPL.