Able to upgrade not just the speed but manufacturer of CPU?

[rygD]

What if you die in 5 minutes? I agree with you, though. Allowing others to live off of the work of others is not what I think it was intended for. (And when it comes to writers, I can think of a couple that died poor, and now their stories are huge business.)

 

[Caine]

Sure, though I would deem it justified that a widow/widower of a writer can continue to provide for herself/himself and her/his kids through the sale of copyrighted works of her/his husband/wife.

 

[rygD]

Too often it is some other person that makes a living off of someone else's work, not the family. I still don't think, in the modern world, it makes any sense for the family to be able to live off the legacy of their deceased parent or spouse.

 

[Caine]

Are you saying you are in favour of 100% inheritance tax?

Personally, I think it should be possible to ensure your wealth goes to your loved ones when you die. Whether your wealth is in the form of savings or IP should not matter.

<edit>By the way, we are getting really, really off-topic here. Perhaps we should split off the IP discussion?</edit>

 

[rygD]

If I leave my money to someone they should be able to have that. If I write a book, they should not be able to collect all the money from sales after my death, or adaptations of that book. Once I die the book should probably become public domain. I have still never heard a convincing argument for another way of handling it. I am probably not convinced because money is not all that important to me, and I think people should earn what they get.

Most of this discussion has been off topic, including the stuff between @God Ginrai and myself (despite his claims...but I do not want to continue that discussion).

 

[levi]

Are you saying you are in favour of 100% inheritance tax?

Personally, I think it should be possible to ensure your wealth goes to your loved ones when you die. Whether your wealth is in the form of savings or IP should not matter.

Well, it's already different between IP and wealth. Wealth doesn't have an expiry date on it, except through inflation and profligate descendants, while copyright-based IP expires after 50/70 years post expiry of the author. One day it's there, next day it isn't.

Although perhaps the death+x copyright term is a compromise between your position and mine.

 

[Plume]

Did any of you consider an unconditional basic income ?
Depending on its implementation, it can solve some problems you raised here.

 

[ible]

i think the death thing makes sense. if your copyrights disintegrated after you died, then your competitors could hire hitmen to get your IP...

not much else makes sense, though.

 

[Plume]

How about having a monopoly on violence ? Bonus points for a public service which includes a police provided by the public sector

 

[God Ginrai]

I explicitly said they may be competitive in the future, implying they aren't right now. Neither of us know for sure if one of those companies are planning to enter the high-end phone SoC market. It's unlikely for most of them, I agree, but hardly impossible.

I do find it odd however that you're very quick to dismiss Broadcom, which I think has a fairly good shot at entering said market if they put some effort into it, yet you hold on to Allwinner which have legally disqualified themselves outside of Asia.

And I explicitly stated that we should not dismiss actual possibilities in hope that someone will provide something better down the line. (because that won't necessarily happen) Instead, we should move forward while remaining flexible enough to consider new possibilities when they become available.

Additionally, I have not been championing Allwinner, but instead have been championing not dismissing manufacturers who have chips and are willing to provide. (even if there are conditions that are not favorable) I have also stated that nVidia should not be dismissed, but you seem to have conveniently ignored that.

Most of this discussion has been off topic, including the stuff between @God Ginrai and myself (despite his claims...but I do not want to continue that discussion).

I agree with this, actually, but likely not for the reason you believe our discussion to be offtopic. The topic specifically is looking for a yes or no answer. "Is it possible to upgrade to an SoC with a different manufacturer?", to which the answer is "Yes". Anything further is technically "offtopic".

-God Ginrai

 

[Djoga'Ro]

Did any of you consider an unconditional basic income ?
Depending on its implementation, it can solve some problems you raised here.

Another thing I feel strong about - must have/needs be. We've become way to productive to make people depend on jobs. For starters think away all the unnecessary jobs there are. And then look whats left.

 

[Djhg2000]

And I explicitly stated that we should not dismiss actual possibilities in hope that someone will provide something better down the line. (because that won't necessarily happen) Instead, we should move forward while remaining flexible enough to consider new possibilities when they become available.

Additionally, I have not been championing Allwinner, but instead have been championing not dismissing manufacturers who have chips and are willing to provide. (even if there are conditions that are not favorable) I have also stated that nVidia should not be dismissed, but you seem to have conveniently ignored that.

You clearly are dismissing the possibility of other manufacturers becoming competitive in the future. I like the direction in which Broadcom is heading with the Raspberry Pi stuff and I think it's only a matter of time before the plan to return as an innovative player on the mobile market. As you say we should remain flexible to consider new possibilities when they become available. That said, Allwinner won't have any reason to change their legal practices in the foreseeable future and until then we're forced to ignore them.

Also, I have "conveniently ignored nVidia" by talking about them earlier in the thread. I may not like how they treat the Linux community but they're our best bet if only we can get them to sell us some chips. Their graphics driver could potentially provide us with both Wayland and Vulkan, both of which would show a significant increase in performance.

Edit: After some searching, HiSilicon produces high performance SoCs with Mali graphics. I can't find anything on MOQ and only a single board computer using them (made by 96boards). Since they seem to be a part of Huawei they're probably more careful with GPL. Does anybody know if ED has tried to contact them?

 

[Haraldur]

That doesn't extend to things that don't require support and maintenance services after publication like music, movies, games and such. For software that needs to be maintained and trained, sure.

There is already an abundance of (in descending extent) music, movies and (computer) games. Even in the latter category, if none were produced evermore, I would have more to play than I could over the rest of my life, especially as I can well cope with the graphics of "major" commercial games produced over the last 20+ years. Even without that, there are so many other forms of entertainment that life for almost all would still be just as good without new music, movies and games. Of course, there would still be some production of these things without commercial incentives -- indeed, the lack of commercial offerings would give a motivational boost to non-commercial products (if there were no commercial games, I image there would be more FOSS games). Also, in countries like the UK, there is the BBC (or an equivalent organization) that receives public money to produce news and culture.

I am pretty much a copyright abolitionist. The only argument to give me pause is that given by the FSF: that without copyright, software (as a special case) would become less free (unlike almost everything else) as, for example, a modified Linux kernel could be redistributed without source and reverse-engineering it would be so prohibitively effortful that we would have vendor-lock-in again. This is a legitimate concern. For me there are two possible solutions: firstly, a compromise, with copyright terms lasting only 5 or 10 years (long enough for software, but not really long enough to damage other forms of work -- i.e. I can wait for the latest and greatest music or movies, even 10 years, or I can pirate) or, secondly, full copyright abolition with one additional law: no hardware or software may legally by sold or given without accompanying complete documentation (decently commented or non-obfuscated source code would count as complete documentation).

 

[God Ginrai]

You clearly are dismissing the possibility of other manufacturers becoming competitive in the future. I like the direction in which Broadcom is heading with the Raspberry Pi stuff and I think it's only a matter of time before the plan to return as an innovative player on the mobile market. As you say we should remain flexible to consider new possibilities when they become available. That said, Allwinner won't have any reason to change their legal practices in the foreseeable future and until then we're forced to ignore them.

I am not dismissing them. You suggested that there were plenty of other chip manufacturers who could provide for us instead of nVidia and Allwinner, and I pointed out that they currently have no offerings. Without offerings, they do not make good reasons to dismiss nVidia and Allwinner as options. Sure, they may possibly provide something in the future, but as I mentioned before, we should consider new options if they become available.

Also, whether Allwinner changes their legal practices or not, we are not forced to ignore them. CHIP uses an Allwinner SoC. There's not anything that legally prevents us from purchasing from Allwinner.

Even Exophase, who actually seems to be supporting Rockchip over Allwinner, doesn't see the GPL violations as reasons to dismiss Allwinner:

If Pyra itself doesn't violate the GPL I don't care. Pyra would probably not need to care about including binary blobs for the image signal processor, camera, or video encode. While it sucks, I assume that we'd be willing to concede to a lack of easy access to video decode hardware. How much is this even shaping up on OMAP5?

But I have my doubts about how competitive Allwinner will be over the long term. The last SoC they've released that I'm aware of is a super cheap quad Cortex-A53 made on 40nm (so probably terrible efficiency like Raspberry Pi 3...) A80 is the highest end SoC they've released or announced thus far, and it came out about two years ago. Rockchip is more promising, although they haven't announced anything for processes beyond 28nm yet.

Also, I have "conveniently ignored nVidia" by talking about them earlier in the thread. I may not like how they treat the Linux community but they're our best bet if only we can get them to sell us some chips. Their graphics driver could potentially provide us with both Wayland and Vulkan, both of which would show a significant increase in performance.

Wow, you are really trying to twist my words. I said that you conveniently ignored my comments about nVidia in making your statement that paints me as an Allwinner supporter.

-God Ginrai

 

[rygD]

I agree with this, actually, but likely not for the reason you believe our discussion to be offtopic. The topic specifically is looking for a yes or no answer. "Is it possible to upgrade to an SoC with a different manufacturer?", to which the answer is "Yes". Anything further is technically "offtopic".

-God Ginrai

I don't really care if stuff is of topic, I was only pointing out that if some of the off-topic stuff is moved (already a difficult task with some posts containing a mix of conversations) the rest might as well be moved. The discussion about which currently available SoCs could be moved, although I don't see much benefit from that. If all the off-topic stuff is removed this thread would be a handful of posts.

I do think it would be valuable to keep an eye on potential upgrade SoCs and periodically post them and discuss the pros and cons. We will never get a consensus, but we can at least get a feel for what people think.

@Haraldur I might be ok with that. I have the feeling that somehow even the 10 year thing would be abused out manipulated. An easy one would be "I made a tiny change so it is good for another 10 years", then lawyers get involved, and puerile that don't fully understand the repercussions will make a ruling.

 

[levi]

What exactly have AllWinner done to break the GPL? Is it just a proprietary kernel object, which we all have if we run proprietary graphics cards, or something more serious?

Even our Pandoras are tainted - according to /proc/sys/kernel/tainted it's an out-of-tree module, whatever that means.

 

[God Ginrai]

I do think it would be valuable to keep an eye on potential upgrade SoCs and periodically post them and discuss the pros and cons. We will never get a consensus, but we can at least get a feel for what people think.

I'm all for that. The more SoCs we learn about, the better the chances we can get a good, solid upgrade board that everyone can enjoy.

EDIT: @levi, supposedly they have also used LGPL code in their binary blobs for which they have not released the source for.

-God Ginrai

 

[Haraldur]

@Haraldur I might be ok with that. I have the feeling that somehow even the 10 year thing would be abused out manipulated. An easy one would be "I made a tiny change so it is good for another 10 years", then lawyers get involved, and puerile that don't fully understand the repercussions will make a ruling.

My understanding of copyright law is that if item A is modified slightly to produce item B (let us call B a "Special Edition" like with Star Wars) then A's copyright status is unchanged. Also, if the changes to make B are slight, then B could have no additional copyright status (e.g. I doubt that adding a blue tint to a new release of an old film would be substantial enough for a new copyrighted form). As long as only material from A is used, a clip summary would be fine after 10 years. So... new editions could cause confusion and catch people out, but I doubt it would be a significant problem.

 

[rygD]

It was just an example, a very poor one, to illustrate the kinds of things people would try to pull. I don't think there is a good fix since everyone had their own opinion about what a law really means, and also what is acceptable. You can start with a good idea, and as everyone gets their hands and ideas on it, it may barely resemble the original, and could support the types of things it was intended to prevent. I get the feeling that this is possibly the case with some intellectual property laws. I probably need to read more of the history so I can see how far off I actually am.

 

[bzar]

There is already an abundance of (in descending extent) music, movies and (computer) games. Even in the latter category, if none were produced evermore, I would have more to play than I could over the rest of my life, especially as I can well cope with the graphics of "major" commercial games produced over the last 20+ years. Even without that, there are so many other forms of entertainment that life for almost all would still be just as good without new music, movies and games.

Contemporary art, be it music, movies, games or paintings document the history of culture and society. There's no such thing as "enough art", because there's never any "future art" already made. For example the types of games made document well the advances in technology and changes in society in the visuals, themes and plots they involve. None of those games could've captured the zeitgeist as well as they all combined have. In addition, no game made in the past reflects present, and as such cannot be a commentary on it. One could argue most "art" created doesn't deserve the title and from an art standpoint I'd agree, but even those document what was sold, listened to and considered something people like at the time it was released.

Furthermore, there's still novel art being made. I believe the world is a nicer place with, for example, some of the recent-ish games like braid, the bridge and undertale. I do love many older games, like earthbound, but there's only so many that actually do anything thought-provoking. Sure, if I defined "entertained" as "consuming entertainment" I could just slap youtube on autoplay today and probably never see the same video twice, but I do not think I'd enjoy myself for long. The specific content of the entertainment matters, not just the quantity.

The problem is that there's no telling how much culture needs to be produced for those few gems to appear. They may be the product of someone being inspired by a single line said in a paint-by-numbers first person shooter at a specific point, which provoked a thought in the future developer's mind. The best way to produce more good art is to provide a fertile soil to produce more art. Of course, this should be balanced with other needs of society and the current copyright regimen is way out of line, but new art isn't worthless.