I think they got their act together a while ago. More importantly, part of the reason they got in so much hot water is they didn't use the Pi's GPL compliance technique of moving everything interesting into a blob running on a totally undocumented core. Everything important runs on the ARM core. (I believe some of the newer SoCs have an embedded core for power management, but apparently it's OpenRISC-based.)
Allwinner itself might not be the best example of open source support, but Allwinners products are well supported in the mainline kernel by the outstanding work of the linux sunxi team. See their progress here:
They release plenty of documentation, which is more than can be said for Broadcom who seem to be doing all they can to both stay proprietary and legal. Broadcom supplies binary blobs, some source code (which is definitely not for those blobs given how anal they are about IP/licensing), and almost no documentation; AllWinner supplies binary blobs (which are based on existing open-source, thus easier to reverse-engineer), some source code, and far more documentation. Regardless of the legal situation, the contrast is clear.
Yet they have the best mainline driver support, with a fully open VPU driver. Not saying they did any of that mind you, but they at least put the docs out there and eventually posted their BSP on github under GPLv2, so their changes could be updated & mainlined.
> Yet they have the best mainline driver support, with a fully open VPU driver.
It is not fully open. (http://linux-sunxi.org/CedarX). Partial code was published a year and a half ago, but the video engine still isn't supported.
Their GPUs are Mali, as well, which is still a large obstacle in running a modern kernel.
Not to mention that all the code they published was as code dumps, some was under unclear licensing, and it's never on a remotely modern kernel, so it requires heavy porting. But yeah, they did release the code after years of complaints about GPL violations.
Giving a company credit for community efforts is kind of misleading.
Uhh, if you want a bad experience from a closed source blob, CedarX is your go to. Cedrus is the fully open VPU driver I was referring to, with H265, VP8 and H264 support.
Mali is still closed source, but GPUs in general are in a poor state for open driver support. Luckily you don't need GPU drivers to bring up Xorg on HDMI on Allwinner chips, so unless your playing video games, it is a non-issue.
Their code dumps they have cleared up the licensing on as of late, Tyle from Allwinner did make clear that everything that isn't explicitly licensed in the file itself is under GPLv2, and that that was Allwinner's original intention. The fact that they are ancient BSP kernels is sucky, but the community is making these sub-$1 SOCs run circles around the other SBCs.
cf. http://linux-sunxi.org/GPL_Violations