[Arm-netbook] Allwinner git / GPL stalemate situation

[Alejandro Mery]

On 02/06/12 09:58, Alejandro Mery wrote:
> 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.

here I missed a sentence:
 > The second part makes illegal (?) to anyone to sell a product with it

And to avoid exaggerations here are the results of a quick lsdiff + grep 
+ wc "statistics" of the 3.3 branch

GPL: 1329 (473+856)
PROP: 1075 (307+768)
NONE: 1533 (638+895)
GONE: 2 (0+2)
Total: 3939 (1418+2521)

GPL comes from the presence of the token "GNU"; PROP: are those without 
the "GNU" token but saying "all right reserved"; NONE: are the rest; and 
gone are broken links or empty files. First number is the total, second 
the files not in modules/ and third the files in modules/.

modules/ includes third party drivers (usually modified by Allwinner) 
not built using the normal `make uImage modules`