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by eric_bullington
4366 days ago
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This is an interesting project, but it's a shame they're using a Mediatek chipset instead of an Allwinner one. Mediatek is one of the biggest GPL violators out there, while Allwinner chips are among the most open hardware out there (perhaps the most open). See: http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page The only non open hardware on Allwinner chips is the ARM-licensed Mali GPU, but it's been reversed engineered to the point of producing a working, third-party, open source driver (the lima driver). Both are very inexpensive Chinese chip manufacturers that use ARM-licensed MCUs, so it's not like the Allwinner is a vastly different product. I personally prefer licensing projects with a permissive license that permits closed commercial development, such as the MIT or BSD license, over the GPL. However, when a company like Mediatek chooses to use GPL'ed software and then fails to follow the license terms, I think that displays a contempt for the entire open source community that I cannot support. |
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> The only non open hardware on Allwinner chips is the ARM-licensed Mali GPU
I seriously doubt that any part of Allwinners chips can be classified as open hardware. Just to clarify, this is wikipedias view on what open (source) hardware means:
> The term usually means that information about the hardware is easily discerned. Hardware design (i.e. mechanical drawings, schematics, bills of material, PCB layout data, HDL source code and integrated circuit layout data), in addition to the software that drives the hardware, are all released with the FOSS approach.
> Both are very inexpensive Chinese chip manufacturers that use ARM-licensed MCUs
The chip in this device has a MIPS core. Besides, MCU != IP-core != SoC.