Linux support concerns

[tllim]

It looks like you've made many experiences with Allwinner in the past so you can rate the value of verbal promises made?

I have stated a number of times that I haven't, not with Allwinner anyway. It's true that promises made < actual deliverables. However, it is also true that promises made > no promises made. No promises made and no deliverables was where we were before TL started engaging with Allwinner. He's gotten a commitment from them which doesn't mean anything until they deliver, but is better than nothing and indicates we have some momentum and a hope that things will improve. The Chinese value their reputation and a CEO would not likely want to lose face by committing and not delivering. That's what I hope anyway.

Then I wonder what you're talking about...

So do I, it's a mystery. Posting on no sleep and in a hurry will, from time to time, result in nonsense being posted. That's what happened with that part of my post.

-p

Already meet up with Allwinner folks two days ago at CES and we have some interesting discussion. All the times, Allwinner mostly deal with factory who purchased their chip, factory built as product (like tablet) and sell to merchant, then merchant sell to end users. Even in SBC product, still mostly follow the above path, the only different is instead of "factory", it becomes the board maker. Such path very different than the "intel inside" path, where intel marketing interact a lot with end user.
You may puzzle why I mention about business path, this is important so that we can figure out why we didn't get support from Allwinner as chip vendor and how we get ask and request support from them mow and future. In pass and even now, Allwinner mind is their main interaction is to factory or board maker, NOT the end users (including developers). Who purchase more chip from them, who will get the most support. This is a direct and reasonable business path. Frankly speaking, most of the time when you purchase a tablet, you just know the brand (sometime you even don't know the brand if is a cheap tablet) and you may not look toward who is the factory and what chip using inside. Noted that you may knwo that CPU spec, like quad core A7, memory size, panel size and etc. Since there is a layer (actually more than a layer) between a tablet chip vendor and their end user. It seems this practice expand over to when some vendor using their chip to build single board computer.  This is why until now there is no single contact window that inside Allwinner that actually focus on dealing with open source community and I get this confirmation when chat with them. In order to change this, I need to bring this attention up to their president (CEO) which I already did few weeks ago. If dealing this issue at manager level (where the level that most board makers able to approach), it will not work due to not their common business and engineering support practice. Their president at least already acknowledge interest in open source community support and figure out a resource to implement this task. Since this already in motion, I will keep push toward into this direction and hopefully I can get finally get a dedicate support resource for open source community. hopefully I get provide a good news soon and understand that this is very important to the prosperity of Pine64 platform.
Please note that Allwinner aware the open source activity especially Sunxi, but didn't know "how to deal" or effort on this. From this point of view, this is board maker, such as CHIp or xxxPi, responsibility to deal to open source community.