On the other hand we should expect nothing but good things from esteemed GPL violators such as Allwinner and WMWare, right? /s EDIT: I guess I should qualify the statement wrt WMWare as "supposed violator", since the case isn't over and I haven't looked at the source code.

Allwinner actually signed up as part of an attempt not to be a GPL violator anymore, along with releasing the source to a bunch of their stuff as GPL or LGPL. Thanks to their newly-found interest in compliance I think they may actually be the only company shipping hardware-accelerated MPEG and h.264 decoders that don't require any kind of closed-source code. (Unfortunately, the VP8 decoder is closed still because VP8 isn't copyleft and they can get away with it.)

Was this intended to be a rebuttal? It's really just an unrelated tangent phrased in an misleading way.

It is a rebuttal to the implication that the possibility of the community electing some nefarious personality should be considered valid ground for denying said community any representation. By the same token a bunch of corporations should be denied one. I didn't interpret the post as call for reformed governance, unless you consider

1. Deny individual representation

2. ???

3. Governance problems fixed!

a plan (yeah, I'm being snarky, sorry).

It's not that I think they'll be motivated by altruism, but they presumably have some commercial skin in the linux game. Enough to get them paying those large foundation membership fees at least.