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by floatinglotus 1183 days ago
It’s a Chinese company, they don’t care about OSS licenses.
4 comments

Right, the difference is that there's an enforcement mechanism here.
That is expensive and approximately never gets used and so every tech company continues to infringe.
Also in China and in both cases cross-border / international enforcement is so expensive it is non-existent for open source/free software.
You could just cross out the OSS part and say licenses.

China has a ton of copyright infringing knockoffs of anything remotely popular outside its borders. For a long time, companies like Microsoft took it as granted that the vast majority of their software running in SE Asia was likely pirated.

But they should "care" about public backslash, maybe if some tech YouTubers are willing to cover this topic..?
People don't buy Xiaomi because of their fancy tech, they buy it because it's cheap. Tech YouTuber telling people they steal that tech to make it cheap won't make people stop buying their cheap phones.

You can ask your government to take action for this IP violation by taxing those brands more, or banning them until they stop violating licenses. I'm sure they'll start caring more after that.

Actually, if you look at the custom ROM community, only my device had more than 50K official downloads from just the ArrowOS ROM 's website, and this device is actually more popular on the unofficial side so there's at least x3 more people on lineage and others ROMs - that's not a small amount of people (using arrowos as an example because they have telemetry)

So, me and many others are very angry about this and this is our first and last time getting a Xiaomi device

i.e. only the telegram update channels have 25k-65k subscribers per a single xiaomi device, let alone the whole XDA community

At least one tech YouTuber, Naomi Wu (a.k.a. RealSexyCyborg) has in fact already covered this topic and successfully got a company to comply with their GPL obligations.

Her comment[0] at the time directed at other Tech YouTubers was:

> YouTubers- you CAN make a difference by making GPL compliance

> a condition of your product reviews. I'm happy to mediate in

> Chinese if there is any miscommunication. GPL compliance means better,

> more functional, more innovative phones for everyone.

[0] https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/143734308046669414...

And this wasn't the first time she was involved in the resolution of such situations:

* "Creality GPL Update - Naomi Wu Released CR-10S Marlin Source Code" Joel Telling (a.k.a 3D Printing Nerd) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pODH6FR4nU8>

Content Advisory: Joel chooses not to wear a suit & tie to present his videos.

You think China is going to change their national policies and business practices because some Western YouTubers make videos about it? Unless you're like 14, I'm in absolute awe that any adult with even the most minimal understanding of geopolitics would think this is a solution.
People don't care that apple resolved iPhone worker suicides with jumpers nets, I don't think they will care of some weird, obscure licensing topic
It’s a Chinese company, they don’t care about O̶S̶S̶ ̶l̶i̶c̶e̶n̶s̶e̶s copyright.