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

[Henrik Nordström]

tis 2012-06-26 klockan 13:26 +0100 skrev lkcl luke:

>  there might be a third way: altruism.  i may try the route "look, we
> got you orders of magnitude 10e6, you've made money comfortably, and
> your business is stable and not at risk.  how about you help us to
> help you, by releasing the cedarx source code and other bits?"

But why?

>  perhaps with a leeetle bit of "stick" in as well, by mentioning that
> people like doing reverse-engineering and that would mean that the
> copyright notice on code distributed with *their* product would be
> some random person and not "Copyright (C) Allwinner Tech" :)

I don't see how this would work.

Convince them to release more details on the CedarX hardware design
might work, indirectly aiding development of a free driver. But I would
not count on it.

Freeing a proprietary piece of software (or hardware) which has been
proprietary for many years is inherently complex process. And efficient
video decoding is a lot about software. And it's a key technology for
Allwinner. And it's a company where marketing do not understand why
arch/arm/mach-XXXX/ needs to be provided in source form.

Regards
Henrik