[Arm-netbook] $250 Dev Kit

[Philip Hands]

On Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:12:42 +0000, Gordan Bobic <gordan at bobich.net> wrote:
> 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.

That's fine, but a lot of these things are a market for lemons -- the
customer has no way of determining the quality inside the box, so the
people that make the cheapest nastiest crap drive the quality producers
out of business -- particularly when they can steal the software from
the people that produced it without reciprocating.

I bought a remote controlled wlan webcam recently -- I am motivated to
buy GPL compliant kit, and am willing to pay at least twice the price to
do so, but the combination of manufacturers madly cloning one another's
devices, and middle-men misrepresenting what they're selling makes it
pretty much impossible to have any clue what you're likely to get in the
box, let alone whether it's really possible to rebuild the firmware from
the sources.  Of course, the cheap clones are really quite poor, which a
normal consumer should also understand, but only after they've been
ripped off, and sometimes not even then (judging by the glowing Amazon
reviews).  I resorted in the end to buying several from Amazon, and
sending all bar one back, saying that I was doing so because they were
GPL violating.

> 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.

Well, that's what he's arguing for, and I have to say I agree, but the
problem is that as he says, many of the offenders are out of business by
the time you get to the second lawyers letter.

Perhaps one of the bigger repeat offenders needs to be got to the point
where it's established as a point of fact that they are in violation,
and as such no longer have any distribution rights under the GPL, and
then just trash all their products whenever they hit a western market.

Of course, they'll then comply instantly, and it always seems somewhat
churlish to refuse them readmittance to the fold after that.  That's why
the headline case with the press photo of a customs man taking a
sledge-hammer to a shiny new toy never quite happens.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
|-|  HANDS.COM Ltd.                    http://www.uk.debian.org/
|(|  10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London  E18 1NE  ENGLAND
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