GPL-Violator Allwinner Joins The Linux Foundation

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 12 June 2015 at 09:49 AM EDT. 33 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
In an interesting move, Allwinner Technology is joining the Linux Foundation.

Allwinner Technology is the Chinese company producing a range of low-end SoCs for Android tablets and other devices. Allwinner hardware is popular with many in the open-source community due to their SoCs appearing in lower-cost hardware and the thriving Linux-SunXi community. Unfortunately, Allwinner as a company is still "learning" to be open-source friendly and to not violate the GPL and other licenses.

Allwinner has violated the GPL multiple times, obfuscated their code, screwed around with their licenses, etc. They have said they're taking actions internally to improve the situation and last month at least released some open-source CedarX code finally, but it's still a long-road ahead.


It will be interesting to see if Allwinner joining the Linux Foundation has any positive, long-term benefits for the open-source community. While one would think that they'd now clean up their game and stop violating the GPL, etc, they've also been members of Linaro since last year and that didn't seem to avoid their issues in the past few months.

Other new Linux Foundation Members are Datto, LINBIT, and Nutanix. More details via the Linux Foundation press release.
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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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