[Arm-netbook] Allwinner's LGPL violation

David Lanzendörfer david.lanzendoerfer at o2s.ch
Thu Mar 19 21:38:05 GMT 2015


Hi
> There's bit of a stink over Allwinner using LGPL'd code in their
> binary-only media lib, and then a few days later they try to conceal it
> by changing function names. Luke, what is your take on that?
I can explain the whole process in a whole detail, because I was directly 
involved in the process of this decision and I can tell where this is going 
right now:
The rename was done to fix the LGPL violations by adding a wrapper for the 
GPLed libraries which will be LGPLed and published.
This way we have Binary<->LGPLed open source code<->GPL libraries
Next step will be to drop the whole "we ship our own SDK"-thing and move over 
to stream our code into the existing open source alternatives.
But until the FOSS libraries have all the functionality from the shipped SDK 
we can not just stop supporting our customers in China.
Also we can not suddenly make it open source for the following reasons:
* Some engineers and managers do not fully comply with the GPLing
  of their code yet.
* The code has awful coding style and my armcc refuses to compile at least 2/3
  of the code because of the Chinese comments.
* Also some of the engineers obviously have never heard the term "revision
  control" which makes it even harder to locate the actual version of the
  source code from which the binary was compiled from... -.-'

Cheers
	David
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