Allwinner Publishes New CedarX Open-Source Code

For months now Allwinner has been violating the GPL and have attempted to cover it up by obfuscating their code and playing around with their licenses while jerking around the open-source community. At least today they've made a positive change in open-sourcing more of their "CedarX" code.

I was told by Allwinner in early April they were taking actions internally but they didn't enlighten me with further details. This week they've now published more CedarX code. The updated CedarX code contains a new, modular architecture, is GPL-compliant according to their analyzed code and scanners, and there's a partial release of the CedarX video decoder. The decoder code released thus far covers MPEG2, MPEG4, MJPEG, and H.264.

In response to their poor open-source track record thus far, the response was, "As a growing company, we are doing our best to understand the needs of the open source software community. This is a learning process. We're working with different people across the Linux development community to better understand best practices...Open source software development is a collaborative process. It works because people genuinely want to help others improve and be successful. Some people are new and others help them learn the ropes over time. We hope that this same positive feedback process can be applied to GPL."

While a nice step, this latest Allwinner action has already been criticized within the Linux-SunXi community on some grounds: there's still lacking register documentation, the modular architecture indicates they might keep some modules closed-up in the future, etc. Hit up this Linux-SunXI thread for the Allwinner message and all of the responses thus far.