[Arm-netbook] Any ARM SoC has Open-Source access to hardware video decoder ?

[Gordan Bobic]

On 06/26/2012 11:28 AM, Alexey Eromenko wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 1:25 PM, Peter Steenbergen
> <p.steenbergen at j1nx.nl>  wrote:
>>>
>>> (explain them that desktop Linux market has over 15,000,000 PCs
>>> world-wide, and explain them, that if they comply with GPL they could
>>> take part of it... several percent)
>>> Just 2% of this Linux market would equal to 300,000 sales for Chinese.
>>> (which may or may not be enough to justify the costs of drivers
>>> development... but I hope it is enough)
>>>
>> They have 1.6 billion people over there in china. They don't care about the
>> world
>
> [correction] only 1.3 billion people, according to Wikipedia.
> Assuming that those 1.3 billion wanna play Angry Birds, they can keep Android.
> If those 1.3 billion people wanna do some serious work on their
> computers, full Linux OS is the way to go.

You're missing the point. Most of the product based on these SoCs are 
fire-and-forget one-offs of questionable quality. If it just about works 
as shipped that is good enough. Future development and support cease. 
They couldn't produce things at their price points they do if they had 
to actually do longer term support, write decent code, upstream it, etc.

Note that I am not singling out any one manufacturer, nor even 
manufacturers from any particular country (there are certainly companies 
in the UK that are manufacturing and shipping branded Android slates 
without GPL compliance).

But as I said before - you get what you pay for. Don't waste your time 
moaning about it. Vote with your feet and use a better product. As the 
old saying goes: "Do not teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and it 
annoys the pig."

Gordan