Allwinner Continues Jerking Around The Open-Source Community

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Allwinner Continues Jerking Around The Open-Source Community

While Allwinner has been caught violating the (L)GPL and resulted in obfuscating their code and playing around with their advertised licenses, now this ARM vendor is taking things a step further...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Allwinner-Stripped-Symbols

[user82]

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.

[gigaplex]

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.

They're proving that not only are they aware of the infringement, they are actively taking steps to hide the evidence. If it ever does go to court, that's grounds for increased punitive damages. Not that it's likely to go to court...

[Kraut]

They're proving that not only are they aware of the infringement, they are actively taking steps to hide the evidence. If it ever does go to court, that's grounds for increased punitive damages. Not that it's likely to go to court...

Doesn't the FSF go after GPL violators?

[Calinou]

Doesn't the FSF go after GPL violators?

They do only if they own the copyright, which is not the case of all GPL'd software. Some of it even has multiple copyright holders, making it very complicated to enforce it.

[Adarion]

Those allwinner folks are rather fresh. I will make sure to avoid them and their products. I already told a bunch of people not to support this nasty behaviour.

I mean, really, what more can you ask? You get the stuff for free with all sorts of freedoms. The only thing you are requested to do is share the stuff that was free again free as in freedom. It is not that hard. If they can't at least do that they do not deserve any money on this planet.

[Nille]

And what is the opinion from ffmpeg?

[mcirsta]

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 ?

[misGnomer]

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.

[DataPath]

They do only if they own the copyright, which is not the case of all GPL'd software. Some of it even has multiple copyright holders, making it very complicated to enforce it.

The FSF will back copyright enforcement suits for projects outside of the FSF as well. Busybox being the most notable, but Scummvm is a clearer-cut case of a project that the FSF wouldn't have their own claim in.

http://torquemag.io/busybox/

http://sev-notes.blogspot.com/2009/06/gpl-scummvm-and-violations.html

It's still necessary for an actual copyright holder in the project to participate in the suit, but the FSF will sometimes provide logistical support and even legal counsel.