[Dev] [libreplanet-discuss] EOMA68 and freedom in digital technology

[Josh Branning]

On 10/09/16 20:38, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
>> See what Olimex has been doing for years then.
>
>   you're aware that olimex operates as a criminal cartel, from shipping
> GPL-violating A10 bootloaders and kernels provided by Allwinner, back
> around 2011/2012?   you're also aware that with the sole exception of
> the olimex laptop's PCBs the only thing that they provide is
> auto-generated PDFs *from* the schematics source code... not the
> actual schematics and certainly not the PCB design files?

I think this is a little unfair to Olimex and is at least partially 
untrue. For instance, schematics and pcb files CAN be found, for most of 
their boards. [1]

Unlike your boards, which give a 404 forbidden message when trying to 
access the server. [2] Hopefully this is something you can correct.

Though I can see that the advantage over the Olimex boards is that you 
ship with a libre operating system from the start.

In regards to the A64 (used in the Olimex laptop), /mainline/ u-boot, 
from the sunxi.org wiki [3]:

'   Basic support for the A64 SoC has been been merged into 2016.05-rc1. 
This covers UART, MMC and required GPIOs and clocks, but no Ethernet or 
USB yet. Also as there is no information on the DRAM controller so far, 
the SPL support is not enabled, so boot0 is required at the moment to 
get U-Boot loaded.

Also, I think that the Olimex laptop has not yet been released, so that 
gives developers time to build more support, before they start selling.

[1] 
https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO/tree/master/HARDWARE/A20-OLinuXino-LIME
[2] http://hands.com/~lkcl/eoma/microdesktop
[3] http://linux-sunxi.org/A64