Linux Sunxi community found GPL licensee violations in Allwinner CedarX media codec library, these violations were reported to Allwinner – the result? Allwinner push in GitHub new binaries with stripped symbols to make it harder to detect the GPL violations. Shame on you Allwinner and this comes after all the marketing crap and high level management statements about how committed they are about Open Source!
More details on this drama you can read at here and here cnx-software blog and at Phoronix.
olimex 
Mar 26, 2015 @ 09:40:38
This is sad:-( what consequences will have with you in the future?
Mar 26, 2015 @ 09:47:24
we will not use CedarX
Mar 26, 2015 @ 09:56:39
I’m referring not only on this. Will you switch from Allwinner to another company?
Mar 26, 2015 @ 11:34:11
They renamed some functions and presented them as wrappers but they also seem to be doing some effrots to try and do the things the right way: “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.”
At least the latest artcile on cnx (linked by you) says so. I can imagine it is really not easy for them to open source if they have worked the way it is mentioned in the article – poor code quality, comments in Chinese, some developers not using source control at all(WTF?!).
Mar 26, 2015 @ 12:17:28
Same for AmLogic: they do have Android and Linux repositories (“OpenLinux”) but they will only give you access if you sign a high-volume commercial agreement with them
Mar 28, 2015 @ 12:15:13
Maybe it’s time to boycot Allwinner altogether and turn to the manufacturers that do not parasite the Linux effort.
Mar 28, 2015 @ 13:18:31
and these manufacturers are …? Freescale which was bought recently by NXP and their products are with unknown future or TI, Samsung which do not care anything but the big commercial corporate customers?
Mar 28, 2015 @ 17:47:19
What is the situation with Mediatek? I remeber you mentioned that you have made some connections with them at etiher Embedded World or LinuxCon Europe last year. Also Rockchip – these SOMs of yours seem to have a lot of power in them 🙂
Of course I do not know how are these companies regarding OS and Linux support?
Mar 29, 2015 @ 00:06:54
we made contact with Mediatek Linux developers but their managers said no datasheets and info without NDA and this project was stuck, Rockchip is much more closed than Allwinner
Mar 29, 2015 @ 11:24:13
What are you rambling about? Do you have information about Freescale that the rest of the world does not have?
Besides that, i can hardly believe that support from Allwinner is better than that from Freescale or TI.
Mar 30, 2015 @ 12:20:54
yet another ignorant but rude post from you 🙂 I hesitated should I feed the trol over the weekend but I will bite
perhaps you missed that Freescale was bought by NXP and one year ago they shut down all their imx development teams including the one in Israel who worked on imx7?
Allwinner and TI as companies both have no support for Linux but there is friendly Linux-Sunxi community which work on Allwinner SOC Linux support while there is no such equivalent community for TI chips. The result is that Allwinner chips are better supported than TI chips and if you have problem you can get easily help.
BTW how many projects do you have with Freescale and TI Linux boards?
Mar 29, 2015 @ 14:22:32
Well, Tom, they kind of work with both Allwinner and TI, and the latter cooperation gave Olimex some hard time (the AM3352-SOM). So from their standpoint I can see how TI had worse support than Allwinner. And of course there is always the financial side of things – the Chinese companies offer extremely low prices (compared to their big western counterparts) and this is important if you manufacture low to medium sized batches (in the 1000s, not in the millions) and for low-price-point target products like the LIME series.
Mar 28, 2015 @ 22:04:48
BTW: It’s called phoronix (;-p).
Mar 30, 2015 @ 13:18:40
corrected, thanks!
Mar 30, 2015 @ 14:00:45
@Olimex
I am annoyed by the fact that in my opinion you are spreading FUD. ( Unless you have more *facts* than us and in that case i would very much like to hear about them.)
Apr 29, 2015 @ 21:53:22
A message from Freescale about the product portfolios after the merger:
“The two companies’ portfolios overlap primarily in only one area, RF power products. In this case, NXP has decided to sell their RF power portfolio and keep the industry-leading Freescale RF portfolio. All other product families are expected to complement each other very nicely. For instance, the Freescale Kinetis MCU combination with NXP’s leadership in connectivity and security is an easy and obvious fit. The same is true for NXP’s FM tuners and Freescale’s i.MX and Infotainment systems”