Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] GPL defense issues

[Maxime Ripard <maxime.ripard@free-electrons.com>]

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Hi Greg,

On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 01:50:18PM +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 06:26:55PM +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> > > Someone in a reddit thread about this email conversation said, in trying
> > > to quote Linus, something along the lines of "the nuclear option should
> > > have been done to Allwinner a long time ago".  And that proved my point
> > > exactly.  Allwinner was a pain for a very long time.  But as developers,
> > > and through the efforts of a lot of people at the Linux Foundation and
> > > Linaro, Allwinner is now a contributor to the kernel, and actively
> > > sponsors developers to write GPLv2 code for their chips.
> > 
> > While I generally agree with you on this topic, this is simply not
> > true.
> > 
> > As the Allwinner SoC maintainer, I never received any patch from
> > someone either from the Linux Foundation or Linaro. And to the best of
> > my knowledge, I'm not aware of anyone being paid by Allwinner to work
> > on the kernel.
> 
> You wouldn't have gotten anything from the LF (we don't have many
> developers as you know), but I thought that Allwinner was part of
> Linaro, is that not correct?

They used to yes. However, even though I don't really how Linaro works
internally, my understanding was that being part of Linaro doesn't
imply that you have engineers assigned. It's probably related to some
level of membership.

Anyway, like I was saying, no one from Linaro ever contributed
something meaningful (except some cross-tree patches, and the usual
"maintainance" patches).

> > Allwinner is not a pain anymore because a few hobbyists started
> > working on the kernel to improve the situation.
> 
> Really?  How did the work for the Chip computer come about?  That's an
> Allwinner processor, right?

It is. But it was built on what the community did (ie, the hardware is
from Allwinner, the software is not).

Maxime

-- 
Maxime Ripard, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
http://free-electrons.com

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