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

[Roman Mamedov]

On Tue, 26 Jun 2012 16:19:35 +0200
Vladimir Pantelic <vladoman at gmail.com> wrote:

> freedom comes with the price of battery life :)

Should have signed that with "Sent from my Yeeloong". :)

But seriously.
In the western world companies are often hesitant to open low-level details
majorly because their concern is zomg patents zomg intellectual property zomg
we will get sued. Like you said it is less of a concern in China. So maybe
this is one more aspect where it'll be easier than with the western companies
to find certain amount of support and cooperation. What remains in my opinion
is convincing Chinese companies management that going through all "our" silly
rituals (publishing the source code, with proper GPL headers everywhere, etc),
will be actually beneficial for them.

Now.
Consider the A10 was a first-class supported platform in Debian. With a
straightforward installation process, every device fully and reliably
functioning, with rock-solid 2D and Xv acceleration and complete OpenGL ES
support.

Next step?
You can make 10 million small form factor PCs, think Mele A1000 maybe without
SATA/RCA/remote and no Android b/s, just with Debian from the factory, priced
$50 and sell them to the education or government market.

The A10 (or maybe its next generation) with good X11 acceleration and other
mentioned things working would have no problems running even heavier software
like LibreOffice and Firefox. But perhaps few even understand that these
"Android TV Boxes" are just one little step from being an almost full-featured
desktop PC which costs $50 and consumes 5 Watts at full load.

So maybe getting the point across that small things which aren't really going
to endanger their ongoing Android TV box business, just require a little effort
(releasing all the needed bits under the GPL), but may *significantly* expand
potential uses of their product, could help in achieving the goal.

-- 
With respect,
Roman

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Stallman had a printer,
with code he could not see.
So he began to tinker,
and set the software free."
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