Allwinner not only violates the GPL, but obfusts the code

Chinese chip designer Allwinner regularly violates the terms of the GPL license, without opening the source code of its implementation of the Linux / Android kernel and the U-Boot bootloader. They embed LGPL code in binary blobs and commit other violations.

All this despite the fact that the Allwinner SoC is very popular among low-cost devices. A large open source community has formed around some of them.

At the same time, the company constantly puts the code on Github, indicating the LGPL license . At the same time continuing to use binary fragments.
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Well, people had no choice but to conduct reverse engineering of Allwinner components to get rid of blobs in their devices, and to assume that the Chinese do not quite understand what needs to be done and is simply not overly attentive.

But now new circumstances have emerged that are difficult to write off for an oversight, although anything is possible. With another violation of the free license, Allwinner changed the names of some functions borrowed from the LGPL libraries libavcodec and others.

This fact is now being discussed in the Open Source community. All indications are that Allwinner did not rewrite the library code at all to get rid of the license terms, but really only made changes to the names of the functions. Such a minimum obfuscation.

Well, so they can attract the attention of Software Freedom Conservancy, which recently sued VMware for violating the GPL.