--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68

On Sat, Sep 10, 2016 at 9:07 PM, Josh Branning lovell.joshyyy@gmail.com wrote:

On 10/09/16 20:38, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:

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See what Olimex has been doing for years then.

you're aware that olimex operates as a criminal cartel, from shipping GPL-violating A10 bootloaders and kernels provided by Allwinner, back around 2011/2012? you're also aware that with the sole exception of the olimex laptop's PCBs the only thing that they provide is auto-generated PDFs *from* the schematics source code... not the actual schematics and certainly not the PCB design files?

I think this is a little unfair to Olimex and is at least partially untrue. For instance, schematics and pcb files CAN be found, for most of their boards. [1]

yes - you're catching up (three people kindly pointed this out)

Unlike your boards, which give a 404 forbidden message when trying to access the server. [2] Hopefully this is something you can correct.

it has. explained also in other posts since you replied to this.

Though I can see that the advantage over the Olimex boards is that you ship with a libre operating system from the start.

which gives you a clear message: i will *not* compromise on software freedom for the purposes of profit maximisation. actually it's more specific than that: i will NOT put designs into people's hands when i know that they will become distressed as a result (due to viruses emptying their bank accounts, or being forced to spend money on throwing away perfectly good hardware due to software driver incompatibility and so on).

In regards to the A64 (used in the Olimex laptop), /mainline/ u-boot, from the sunxi.org wiki [3]:

u-boot is not the early bootloader. the early bootloader is proprietary.

' Basic support for the A64 SoC has been been merged into 2016.05-rc1. This covers UART, MMC and required GPIOs and clocks, but no Ethernet or USB yet. Also as there is no information on the DRAM controller so far, the SPL support is not enabled, so boot0 is required at the moment to get U-Boot loaded.

... and is that early bootloader, boot0, proprietary or not, yes or no?

Also, I think that the Olimex laptop has not yet been released, so that gives developers time to build more support, before they start selling.

meanwhile, the opportunity has been totally lost, to put a financial "foot down" (just as with NextThingCo did with Allwinner over the R8) i.e. to say "no, allwinner, we will *not* place an order for 50,000 units with you *UNTIL* you give us the full source code including the full source code of the early bootloader, boot0"

now the sunxi community is expected to pick up the pieces - unpaid - and to clean up allwinner's mess. oh, but worse than that, the team behind the Allwinner A64 think it's *OKAY* to consider boot0 to be proprietary!

just because pine64 and olimex took your money instead of setting software freedom as a first priority.

tell me: how is that okay? if you *really think* it is okay, explain how.

l.