[Arm-netbook] $250 Dev Kit

[Gordan Bobic]

Philip Hands wrote:
> On Fri, 6 Jan 2012 09:30:15 +0000, lkcl luke <luke.leighton at gmail.com> 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).
>>
>>  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 have a good point there actually -- back in the day when people
> still used faxes, I used to maintain mgetty for Debian, and USRobotics
> would send me their new models to test for free.
> 
> Its about time one or two of the hardware manufacturers woke up to the
> fact that they could get a market advantage by doing the same, although
> reading Mathew Garret's recent missives on the supposed economic benefit
> of GPL violation, perhaps I'm deluded.  It would be nice to prove him wrong.

Having just googled the missives you mention, they are basically saying 
largely that "it may be hard for incompetent manufacturers to comply 
with GPL". The are only two points I would like to raise in response to 
his comments:

1) Do we really need manufacturers with that degree of competence? Their 
product is likely to be of such poor quality that we are better off 
without them.

2) On the subject of lack of enforcement, I think there needs to be a 
much, much stronger enforcement of GPL. A handful of large offenders 
needs to be made example of in courts. Unfortunately, most such 
companies are treading in the gray area of cost/benefit given the 
limited resources of the EFF and FSF. There is, however, an additional 
angle here that may crop up unforeseen by most. There are commercial 
companies that create GPL software. They do so because it makes good 
business sense for them. One of these days, another commercial company 
is going to come up with a product that is based on the first one and 
fail to release their "embrace and extend" features back with sources. 
At that point it'll become treatable as a more conventional commercial 
licensing breach, but it will likely come to something because both 
sides will have a distinct commercial interest in it (as opposed to one 
side having a socio-philosophical interest in it).

Apologies for going off on a tangent.

Gordan