On Friday, March 6, 2015 at 5:42:22 AM UTC+10, Michal Suchanek wrote: > Sure, allwinner is required, legally, to release some sources. And it > might have signed some NDAs to not release them so it may as much > legally be obliged to not release the same sources. It might in fact > have put itself into a situation when it is not allowed to ship a > product with this software, legally. > > However, the copyright of the ffmpeg authors or Linux authors is > somewhat theoretical in China while the NDA they signed with the > business next door is much less. > Michal this logic is wrong. Customs I was referring is China own customs. http://www.chinabusinessreview.com/tackling-intellectual-property-infringement-in-china/ You will find customs as one of the methods to enforce against intellectual property infringement this includes copyright infringement.
1/2 a million routers were crushed by China customs when a company refused to release firmware source code as required and their website blocked by the great china firewall. The GUY next door with the NDA over Allwinner is not going to help Allwinner when the products are crushed and Allwinner web site is blocked from the outside world by the great china firewall. FOSS enforcement only seams theoretical in China because FOSS does not do it often. Also normally when FOSS enforcement does happen to Chinese companies they mostly go out of business. The router vendor tired that Chinese smiley face method as well. Allwinner need to make up its mind either it only sells inside china or it want to sell to the world. If it wants to sell to the world software infringement is not on. Also remember github is USA so anything infringing hosted on github can be removed by DCMA orders. Due to this infringement being found the source code need to be mirror to a country where copyright cannot be enforced until its fixed. In fact to remain legally clear it should be removed from github by them until its fixed. This is the multi country legal problem. > And as has been pointed out the situation can be 'corrected' by > releasing modularized sources with the blobs as properly separated > modules without providing anything useful to linux-sunxi at all. Other than the fact it legally should not be on github in it current state and can be removed at any time due to the fault by a DCMA order. So the benefit it gives linux-sunxi is legal right to use more hosting. Please note China customs the person who can place complain is a FOSS developer or one of their competitors. This is why this is so serous the FOSS developer may do nothing against Allwinner but one of Allwinner competitors take this information to put them out of business. Peter Dolding -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "linux-sunxi" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
