[Arm-netbook] $250 Dev Kit

[Gordan Bobic]

lkcl luke wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 9:18 AM, Gordan Bobic <gordan at bobich.net> wrote:
>> Alejandro Mery wrote:
>>> First of all, thank you Tom! you are amazing!
>>>
>>> I just replied Eva telling her that I am buying one for the $250, and
>>> asking how to pay it.
>>>
>>> This is the brochure I got from her before http://goo.gl/T2fQu if
>>> anyone else wants to see what's in the kit.
>> That looks really nice. I'd love to work on this, but for the next month
>> I'm unlikely to have the time - I have to get the RedSleeve beta (RHEL6
>> port) out for public testing. After that, however, I'll be looking to
>> put together kernels for as many ARM systems as I can for it, so at that
>> point getting one of these would be really handy - assuming Allwinner
>> want a clone of RedHat Enterprise running on it (since RedHat don't have
>> a port of their own for ARM).
> 
>  so, you'll be doing something that's of benefit to them (but you
> don't need the schematics to do it).

That depends on the stage of the kernel and just how much hacking will 
be required to get it to work, I guess. :)

>  the question you need to ask yourself is, therefore: why would you
> want to _pay_ allwinner to get something done that _they_ will benefit
> from, rather than the other way round? :)

You make an interesting point. I guess you could see this sort of thing 
as being mutually beneficial (they get support for an enterprisey Linux 
distro, and I get more potential users of the distro). But I thought 
it'd be a bit too cheeky to ask for a donation of a dev kit when they 
are already discounting them for some people here who are doing low 
level kernel hacking that is arguably more generic and a basis for 
anything the rest of us might do based on their products later. :)

So to extend the point you are arguing further - surely the kernel 
developers that are  working on upstreaming the support for the 
Allwinner SoC are more worthy a target for your question: should they be 
paying for the dev kit when it is Allwinner that gets the long-term 
commercial benefit of having their SoC supported in the mainline Linux 
kernel? Compared to that, having a verified distro that supports the SoC 
is relatively minor.

Gordan