[Arm-netbook] A bare image for booting from NAND

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 12:34 PM, Marco Martin <notmart at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> so this is the first outcome of my quest for booting from the nand, and i
> tought it would be nice (and useful for others) to share:
> http://makeplaylive.com/~notmart/Improv/eoma68-A20-nand-bare.raw.bz2
>
> This is a dd of the nand in the following situation:
>
> * it has two partitions: "boot" 16 megabytes long and "root" that is
> everything else
>
> * "root" only contains /lib/modules, all the rest is empty (nicely zero-ed, so
> it compresses nicely)
>
> * Boot0 and Boot1 come from https://github.com/hno/allwinner-boot , revision
> d29c34b , modified to *not* search for a "boot" partition starting with
> "ANDROID!" magic. An open issue here is that version will need to be GPL'd
> (latest and gpl revision won't work, i suspect is for a different kind of
> hardware)

 Allwinner Tech have written explicitly to us - and the message has
been published - that any code released by them which contains GPL
code (despite one of the Managers acting in direct violation of the
Director's instructions to honour GPL compliance by ordering employees
to *remove* any such Copyright notices - an action for which he
eventually lost his job) is to be released under the GPL.

 we are aware that there is (or was) in use, thanks to reports given
to us by the employees, a script which is consistently used to remove
the allwinnertech domain name and replace it with "reillumatech", as
well as remove all GPL Copyright notices.  there is a "reverse" script
provided by the linux-sunxi community which undoes the damage done by
that script.

 so when you say "that version will need to be GPL'd", it already is.

 if this is a problem marco i can explicitly pass on a request to
Allwinner Tech however the response - if one is received in a timely
manner - will most likely be exactly the same as the previous one,
along the lines of "yes you have permission to put GPL Copyright
notices on that code" when in fact we already have permission to do
exactly that [on their behalf].

 normal practice is for the Copyright holders to do that, and to make
the modifications to the files themselves and to explictly publish the
files as modified by them.  however this is not a normal situation.

 so, to be clear: you may not *assume* that the code is GPL'd:
permission and instructions have *already been given* that it *is*
GPL'd, *despite* notices on the files which state otherwise.

l.