[Arm-netbook] Allwinner git / GPL stalemate situation

[Alejandro Mery]

On 02/06/12 06:27, lkcl luke wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 1:48 AM,<ml at rsee.net>  wrote:
>> What is the status of the GPL'd code for the rhombus-tech A10 project ?  I know we have code from some leaks, but wasn't there something about how Allwinner has/will release the source ?
>
>   they already have.  they provided the GPL source code of both the
> linux kernel and u-boot within 72 hours of it being requested, *even
> though* we had not actually been supplied with binaries.  this was
> done... several months back, and it's why we were so impressed with
> them.

pushing 2.6.36 to github.com/allwinner/ was Tom's doing and it was an 
awesome starting point!... the unfortunate part is that there are more 
files in the patchset saying "all rights reserved" than files saying 
anything about GPL or GNU, but the vast majority doesn't contain any 
license or copyright text at all. The clock and pm code is specially 
critical, we can't legally use it at all but we can't live without it.

Tom has told 3.0 was going to be released in the same way, after all 
they are working in 3.3 these days so that code base is dead, but 
"Market" then decided it wasn't a good idea and the hopes started to fall.

we as individual hackers probably can live without problems with the 
code we have, but in it's current legal state it's impossible to even 
try to mainline any part of it and also the binaries produced are 
incompatible with the GPL license and so can't be distributed. The first 
part affects everyone working on maintaining and improving this kernel 
because the ultimate goal can't be achieved and porting it release after 
release is *very* consuming.

Even if in perfect world they should release the sources in a GPL 
compliant way, I believe almost everything would be solved with a simple 
authorization from Tom's boss for him to "fix" the "buggy" copyright 
headers in our public tree using his @allwinnertech.com account.

as you seem to have the best contacts of all of us, can you or your 
"associates" talk to the "right manager" to get this done? even if it 
only involves the sun4i code for now.

Thanks!
Alejandro Mery