Allwinner Caught Obfuscating Their Improperly Licensed Code

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 19 March 2015 at 09:25 AM EDT. 31 Comments
HARDWARE
Allwinner is pushing their way to the top of the list of companies hated by the open-source community...

Allwinner has been violating the GPL and has been a known offender on several fronts for GPL violations and overall just isn't a good open-source player. With the recent Allwinner GPL violation coverage, it appears that Allwinner is now obfuscating code in their binary driver to try to conceal the fact that they're taking code intended to be open-source and using it in their binary blob CedarX driver.

Via this Linux-sunxi thread, Allwinner has been changing the names of some functions so these (LGPL) symbols copied from libavcodec, etc, won't show up when searching the binary file. It's not that they rewrote part of their driver to avoid using open-source code but are attempting to obfuscate the origin of the code. See the thread for more details.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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