On Monday 30 January 2012 18:52:19 Thomas Gstädtner wrote: > On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 17:53, Al Johnson <openm...@mazikeen.demon.co.uk> wrote: > > On Monday 30 January 2012 15:42:14 Patryk Benderz wrote: > >> [cut] > >> > >> > This look very interesting. Can’t wait to get my hands on one. > >> > >> It is written 200 EURO, not dollars ($). Makes a difference. > > > > No mention of tax either. It's certainly interesting, especially in > > light of the Lima driver project for the ARM Mali, but we need more > > details. It looks rather like the ZT280-C71 which is usually somewhat > > cheaper, but whose manufacturer doesn't seem to have released kernel > > source. > > You are right. > > It should be noted that this is by no means any new hardware developed > for KDE specifically. > This hardware is already widely available for some time, in dozens (if > not far more) of variants. > I found similar hardware starting at about EUR 70 and the exact same > hardware starting at about EUR 100. > In Europe it seems to be most commonly sold as "Zenithink C71" which > is optically and hardware-wise fully identical to the "Spark", in > China I found it at least under 20 other names with the same hardware, > and much more with slightly different specs. > Many of them are intentionally sold as cheap i$random_apple_product clones. > > I haven't found out which company actually builds the device, though > I'm pretty sure it's none of those found in the product names. All of > those are likely based on AMLogic's reference board designs, and there > is NO LINUX UPSTREAM support for either the SoC or the board. > Also, there is NO SOURCE CODE available publicly (maybe with the > exception of one github repository which seems to have at least some > code) which means that all companies currently selling this device are > violating the GPL.
It may not be upstream, but AMLogic do seem to be publishing source. If everyone is using a reference design it might just work ;-) It looks like their reference bootloader is uboot too. http://openlinux.amlogic.com/wiki/index.php/Arm http://openlinux.amlogic.com/download/linux/GPL_code_release/ The lack of source from OEM and below is nothing new - it's just more obvious than with the routers and STBs where it's been happening for years unfortunately. > There are also no proper spec sheets, datasheets, or code references in any > way. > > It is to hope, that the KDE guys are interested enough to have > everything properly open sourced to be GPL compliant, though I fear > they - like most open source projects - don't have the pull on Chinese > hardware OEMs to change a horrible situation to a good situation. I'll live in hope until there's a proper release. > Anyway - in my opinion so far this is a lot of fuzz about hardly anything. It'll be one of very few tablets that run linux without needing an anti-vendor port. That's a good thing in my book, even if it's not ideal. _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community