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

[Gordan Bobic]

On 06/26/2012 10:55 AM, Alexey Eromenko wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 12:30 PM, Henrik Nordström
> <henrik at henriknordstrom.net>  wrote:
>> tis 2012-06-26 klockan 11:16 +0200 skrev Enrico:
>>
>>> hehe, "where compliance with copyright, trademarks and patents are
>>> pretty meaningless"
>>>
>>> and
>>>
>>> "strategy to leverage proper (and ultimately full) GPL compliance out
>>> of PRC SoC vendors."
>>>
>>> If you are ok with the first you cannot ask for GPL compliance ;)
>
> Well... there are two basic motivations in the world:
> the carrot and the stick.
>
> Since the stick (GPL copyright) is ineffective in China, we can offer
> a carrot instead.
>
> (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)

The problem is that the amount of effort required to do this for each 
SoC manufacturer doesn't seem to be worth the effort. If you are 
prepared to put it in either you have a product you plan to sell quite 
literally millions of (nice thought, but let's face it, it's not going 
to happen before it's ultra-deprecated) to make back the investment in 
time and effort, or your time and effort are worthless.

Seriously - just use a SoC made by the manufacturer that maintains and 
consistently upstreams support for their SoC. It'll save everybody a 
huge amount of effort and you won't end up with an annoyed community 
later on when the SoC ends up being effectively abandoned in terms of 
kernel and library software support.

Gordan