Care to elaborate?

All winner has had a terrible history of gold violations and Linux support. They'll release a kernel binary with support but not sources and not update things for ages.

At least they release far more documentation than Broadcom...

...if you can read Mandarin.

Publicly available documentation in any language is infinitely better than NDA-only documentation.

Some person from linux-sunxi made it his life mission to crucify Allwinner because they (Allwinner) messed up with some Linux kernel tarballs. What you have been reading is the result of this campaign against Allwinner.

1. Allwinner used to distribute Linux kernel tarballs with several device drivers in binary-only (object) files. They were in the correct place and you could recompile the kernel. Those binary .o files would be used so that you could complete the compilation. Such an example is the Mali driver and others that Allwinner did not make an effort to get the rights to redistribute in source. Obviously, this is a GPL violation.

So, how do you deal with this issue? Do you get Allwinner to release the source of the Mali GPU driver due to the GPL violation? :-). Some people wanted to play lawyers and would mess up ANY action unless Allwinner complied fully by releasing source code to things that they did not have a licence (to release source).

2. Allwinner released officially the source of the 3.4 kernel for a range of SoCs (A10 to A83, the H5 should be similar to one of the A?? SoCs): https://github.com/allwinner-zh/linux-3.4-sunxi

Documentation: https://github.com/allwinner-zh/documents Bootloader code: https://github.com/allwinner-zh/bootloader

A few months ago, there was a discussion on LKML on how to deal with GPL violations. Linus and Greg said that being aggressive in pursuing the GPL violations really does not help. Here is an example where it did not help.

You again...

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.

And what about the top comment on this article in this very thread complaining about old kernels and poor video drivers? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12890257

It's the part I missed in my answer. They sadly did not pursue this much further.

Same thing here, this is my only complain with my Orange Pi Plus, it worth checking the Odroid C2 which is great, but more expensive.