It was chosen mainly for the low price. The performance was a little subpar but it had the advantage of a decent video graphics block.
"Now that this platform is more established, I imagine they can apply some pressure to get things like the video core to be more open"
Broadcom was one of the worst companies to get documentation from, even for their own customers. Unless you were a big customer, you're lucky to get the time of day from them. Hopefully, their new owners Avago will have a different attitude towards the open source community.
The OPi chip maybe for not cone from a "respected" western company but it is in all regards a more open chip.
While the datasheet is almost as thin as that of Broadcom it is mostly because they use standard components where the full datasheet is available from arm.
There are also far less magic blobs and crazy boot gymnastics in there.
This isn't some petty nationalist agenda like you're claiming. AllWinner's lack of respect stems from their pathological refusal to cooperate with the Linux kernel and their many GPL license violations. They throw out new hardware cores very frequently, but the hardware is impossible to keep updated (and is thus insecure and hard to use) because AllWinner won't release hardware documentation or source code. I've got a few AllWinner devices, and they're poorly suited as general-purpose computing devices if you need both graphics and a recent kernel. They collect dust with my other nigh-unusable hardware.
Most of the AllWinner support in the kernel has been added despite the company's deplorable position, and the major community repository of information is highly critical of them (http://linux-sunxi.org/Allwinner). It's sad for a company when your major users and developers think so poorly of you.
Broadcom also acted like this for many years, and was similarly hated. The Raspberry Pi has been a bit of a paradigm shift in corporate policy which has earned them a lot more respect. And it's still been a rather slow journey.
If AllWinner wants respect, they can earn it by making their hardware easy to use for the hobbyist and non-commercial developers they're courting with all the cheap knockoffs they're releasing (e.g. Orange Pi, Banana Pi, etc which try and profit off brand name similarity). Blaming it on Western propaganda is just pitiful self-deception.
That's not what I am saying. I'm saying Broadcom is getting a pass because they are a household name.
http://www.orangepi.org/downloadresources/orangepipc2/2016-1...
https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/open-source-hardwa...
http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort
edit: I now see you link to linux-sunxi, so you probably already know about this.
It is not fully open. (http://linux-sunxi.org/CedarX). Partial code was published a year and a half ago, but the video engine still isn't supported. Their GPUs are Mali, as well, which is still a large obstacle in running a modern kernel.
Not to mention that all the code they published was as code dumps, some was under unclear licensing, and it's never on a remotely modern kernel, so it requires heavy porting. But yeah, they did release the code after years of complaints about GPL violations.
Giving a company credit for community efforts is kind of misleading.
Mali is still closed source, but GPUs in general are in a poor state for open driver support. Luckily you don't need GPU drivers to bring up Xorg on HDMI on Allwinner chips, so unless your playing video games, it is a non-issue.
Their code dumps they have cleared up the licensing on as of late, Tyle from Allwinner did make clear that everything that isn't explicitly licensed in the file itself is under GPLv2, and that that was Allwinner's original intention. The fact that they are ancient BSP kernels is sucky, but the community is making these sub-$1 SOCs run circles around the other SBCs.
I can understand being disappointed at this choice, but if no other options exist, then either you're sacrificing price or performance to get more open-ness. My impression has been that this has mostly been about giving a cheap, easy to use software platform, and they've succeeded at that because of the price/performance balance.
That was then, though. Now that this platform is more established, I imagine they can apply some pressure to get things like the video core to be more open.