Sad state of open source on Android tablets

[Angus Gratton]

On Sun, 2010-07-25 at 10:27 +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
>  please add sungworld.com to the list.  as you can see from the
> message relayed (eventually hopefully successfully) today,
> sungworld.com have _explicitly_ stated that they have absolutely zero
> intention of releasing the GPL source code, in direct violation of the
> GPL license.

Thanks Luke. From looking at the sungworld.com site it looks like they
are reselling yet more WM8505-based tablets, similar to the iPed/Gome &
other lines. It's hard to work exactly who is manufacturing, who is
reselling, and who is ripping off these designs as they are often
totally unbranded, or only branded on the packaging.


>  this is getting very very tedious, as there are some fantastic
> hardware products out there, _none_ of which it is easy to "rip off"
> as claimed by the manufacturers

It's worth taking a moment to reflect on the 'shanzhai' culture of small
Chinese manufacturers for a while. The culture is certainly to take no
notice of intellectual property concerns. It's also to rip off
competitors at every turn, copy products, designs, firmware, branding.

(You can read a fairly upbeat take on the shanzhai by engineer
extraordinaire bunnie, here: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 I
don't agree with everything he says, but it's a good read.)

Convincing the companies that OSS is somehow different to the IP that
they otherwise consider a free-for-all battle will be hard, I think.
There is every reason to try, though.


It also seems like in many cases the people making the devices are not
writing the software - the software is being integrated upstream,
probably even the hardware designs are being finalised by a different
company than the one who is manufacturing the units - and the hardware
and software designs are being shared across multiple products.

Convincing these companies that sharing parts of their software is not
going to hurt them is really important. I do believe that it won't hurt
them though, because it's pretty clear that they're currently being
ripped off by competitors anyhow - and when the only real differentiator
is price then the opportunity for a company to differentiate on price
-and- become a good OSS citizen seems like it has the potential to make
them rise above the rest. See the linked blog post for some more of my
thoughts on that.



> , _none_ of which are saleable in the

> U.S. or Europe or any country where Copyright is easily enforceale.

This is another really worthwhile point. As soon as this kind of
infringement costs sales then it's likely these companies will start to
take notice.

I have to wonder whether exporting wholesale is ever part of the
business plan though. These products are churned out for short life
cycles, quickly redeveloped into a new product, and then sold again.
That kind of manufacturing seems to lend itself to the
direct-to-the-consumer no-customer-support model that these Shenzhen
tablets are currently sold under. :).

Good luck with sungworld. In this particular case, as those tablets seem
to share a chipset with WM8505, I'm told VIA is going to release source
code (thx Harald Welte) so pragmatically that's a big win. Of course, it
doesn't solve the overall problem that we're facing here.

Regards,

Angus