12-28-2015, 10:42 AM
I too am concerned as I have owned several Allwinner soc platforms and they all seem to suffer from some serious open-source issues. I own a PCDuino2, PCDuino3, and an ODROID-C1 and can say that the linux community has received ZERO support from Allwinner and that Allwinner has even been found to willingly violate the LGPL repeatedly (ref: http://linux-sunxi.org/GPL_Violations) going so far as to try to obfuscate their code in an attempt to hide that violation.
I am always optimistic that companies will do the right thing but Allwinner\s past offers me little hope. Some of the issues I have seen as a result of their non-involvement are related to hardware accelerated video playback including but not limited to hardware acceleration (High CPU utilization, choppy playback despite a robust GPU) as well as video palette issues.
Now that I've said what (I think) everyone knows already, I sincerely hope that PINE A64's success will lure Allwinner away from the dark side, shoring up their involvement in the open source community, even benefiting other products. Until I see it I remain skeptical (despite funding the Kickstarter project) but hope to be proven wrong.
I am always optimistic that companies will do the right thing but Allwinner\s past offers me little hope. Some of the issues I have seen as a result of their non-involvement are related to hardware accelerated video playback including but not limited to hardware acceleration (High CPU utilization, choppy playback despite a robust GPU) as well as video palette issues.
Now that I've said what (I think) everyone knows already, I sincerely hope that PINE A64's success will lure Allwinner away from the dark side, shoring up their involvement in the open source community, even benefiting other products. Until I see it I remain skeptical (despite funding the Kickstarter project) but hope to be proven wrong.