First off, that problem already exists in the hardware, the damage is already done (as i stated in my blog entry http://libv.livejournal.com/26635.html under "the patent excuse").
Like IMG, ARM is not selling just the hardware design, it is also selling driver development services. When the driver is open source, and competitive, everyone can sell such services, and there's a lot less of those services to sell. ARM has revenue depending on this.
This is one good thing about the IMG revenue coming from Apple, it was mostly licensing costs, not services. If IMG had been selling services on top, their revenue would've been reduced by 75%+ instead of "just" ~50%.
In both 1 and 2, there are a varying amount of blobs spread around kernel tarballs and even kernel git repositories, and Allwinner has been made aware of those being in violation with the GPL quite a numerous amount of time.
Has allwinner gone and resolved all of these issue in the meantime (which is only a brief timeperiod measured in, oh, i don't know, 3 years)? No. At best they did a few but only increased the number of blobs upon every new kernel release.
Stop your nonsense, besides it just being inane, it is quite perpendicular to the truth.
--libv (simosx's bestest friend in the whole world).
So this is the person I was talking about. Hey, libv!
First, libv does not get what is being said, for example, in https://lwn.net/Articles/698452/
The situation with Allwinner fits quite well with what Greg and Linus talk about.
Second, libv as a business person sucks bigly. He was being a PITA to Allwinner and, from what I deduced, would then propose to them to make the problem go away (develop himself the software) for quite some money.
There was another big smoking gun recently, at linaros conference in budapest. Here finally some truth was spoken at 9:40 into the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPjSm_98rgo&t=580s
Like IMG, ARM is not selling just the hardware design, it is also selling driver development services. When the driver is open source, and competitive, everyone can sell such services, and there's a lot less of those services to sell. ARM has revenue depending on this.
This is one good thing about the IMG revenue coming from Apple, it was mostly licensing costs, not services. If IMG had been selling services on top, their revenue would've been reduced by 75%+ instead of "just" ~50%.