Current Status Of Gnu/gpl Infringement?

[DJWillis]

If this is the case (which is great), it might be worth updating the wikipedia page, which makes the situation sound a lot worse. Missing firmware, missing uboot, violation in mplayer.



As Orkie mentions, efforts have been made to clean that article up but people just seem determined to spam that article and overwrite what is 'correct' with misunderstood interpretations or outdated information. It is worth remembering that this is a hobby and should not be the chore it so very often becomes; maintaining Wikipedia against spam is a full time job with very few prospects .

In the end that article (on the subject of the GPL anyway) is much like a number of threads that pop up here every now and then, full of half truths or interpretations that are made from a incorrect understandings or outdated viewpoints. You have to take the view as of now, what is gone is gone and all that.

Whilst I have no great love for GPH as a company and feel they could have handled things very differently the result is the same, to all major intents they are in compliance with the GPL and to mark them otherwise (often on semantics) would be a disservice to them. Especially when you compare them to some of the 'big name' violators that flaunt the GPL.

If there are specific violations then please do inform GPH, inform the maintainers of the GPL code (after all they are the only people who can take direct action) and by all means inform the community but don’t speculate on ‘possible violations’ as it just serves to fuel the misinformation (well IMHO anyway ).
Again, facts always speak louder then speculation .

You also have to remember that the numerous people with 'standing' that banded together to inform GPH of there dissatisfaction with the situation and that also proposed taking further action have been satisfied with the code releases.

On the subject of the video decoding object it is maybe best to think of it on the same lines that mobile operators use to keep there radio code separate from say a Linux powered phone (often choosing to run that radio code on another CPU core). Over simple overview I know but it’s broadly appropriate.

This decoder interface is public and shown in the code (it does not necessarily have to be documented mind you or even clear what flies over that interface) but the resulting engine is as closed as can be.

The MagicEyes decoder implementation broadly complies with this ideal but is not as graceful or as well segregated as it might be but I don’t think any of the mplayer maintainers seem anxious to challenge anything. The same binary object is used in MagicEyes MMSP2 WinCE implementation also.

 

[ThorC]

Ah, I see - thanks for the reply. When I saw the page, the information seemed quite out of date, and I was surprised. I didn't realise that there's been a sort of on-going battle there.

I apologise if my post seemed negative, it really wasn't intended that way. Quite the opposite - I often type in 'gp2x wiki' in my address bar to get to the gp2x wiki, but I did it the other way around by accident 'wiki gp2x' which took me to the gp2x page on wikipedia instead. I read through, and when I got to that part, I was rather surprised by the information in that it seemed out of date and incorrect, especially in light of all the efforts to clear up the controversy and the work (which is very much appreciated) that went into getting it all sorted out.

I thought maybe people didn't often read that bit and it had been left unupdated, so when I saw this thread, thought I would give a link (as it hadn't yet been mentioned) in case someone with better understanding could better correct it.

I'm not sure if your post was directly aimed at me, but I'm sorry if it seemed I was suggesting they were not in compliance and agreeing with the wikipedia article - that wasn't the case at all

My main concern was the fact that people often link to that page when talking about the GP2X (e.g. on slashdot), and people might read that part and be put off or given the wrong impression, which isn't overly fair, especially considering the work that went into getting it sorted out.

 

[rokdcasbah]

if it makes you feel any better, wikipedia is usually only accurate on matters related to buffy the vampire slayer or the like. the rest is a crapshoot as far as i'm concerned h34r:

 

[DJWillis]

I'm not sure if your post was directly aimed at me, but I'm sorry if it seemed I was suggesting they were not in compliance and agreeing with the wikipedia article - that wasn't the case at all

Sorry mate, none of it was directed at you. It was far more of a 'scatter gun' rant .

John

 

[Squidge]

if it makes you feel any better, wikipedia is usually only accurate on matters related to buffy the vampire slayer or the like. the rest is a crapshoot as far as i'm concerned h34r:

and thats kinda reinforced by the fact that schools/colleges/etc ban the use of wikipedia, and some even go as far as a blanket ban on the site's url so you can't even reach it from inside the uni I guess they got annoyed that people were quoting that as there source, as the information held there was completely and utterly wrong.

 

[rokdcasbah]

yeah, unfortunately there's a big difference between a well-written article and a poorly-written one that has a sticker on the top saying "this article may not conform to wikipedia's standards"...

luckily none of articles on "lost" or pokemon suffer from this.

not to be hypocritical...i do use it for a quick fix very often, but stuff like this just shows you how much you need to take into consideration the accuracy of what you read on it...plus that bomis guy is sketchy as hell.

 

[saehn]

Please excuse my semi-hijacking. I did a Google search for "Wikipedia" and "accuracy", and the top results include the following:

-----------------------------

Wikipedia survives research test

The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm

-----------------------------

Assessing Wikipedia's Accuracy

In the wake of questions of accuracy, a survey by the science journal Nature finds that science entries in the volunteer-driven, online encyclopedia Wikipedia are "not markedly less accurate" than those found in Encyclopaedia Britannica.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5055388

-----------------------------

Experts rate Wikipedia's accuracy higher than non-experts

Thomas Chesney, a Lecturer in Information Systems at the Nottingham University Business School, published the results of his own Wikipedia study in the most recent edition of the online journal First Monday, and he came up with a surprising conclusion: experts rate the articles more highly than do non-experts.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061127-8296.html

-----------------------------

Like rockcasbah implies (and as suggested in one of these articles): you should "trust but verify" if you're using Wikipedia for research work... but Wikipedia certainly isn't a quasi-graffiti board where people just routinely post opinionated, inaccurate crap. It's definitely not perfect, but it's not worthless, either. I think of it as a kind of "open source journalism".

We now return to your regularly scheduled episode of "Current Status of GNU/GPL Infringement?".

 

[Squidge]

We now return to your regularly scheduled episode of "Current Status of GNU/GPL Infringement?".

amen!

 

[sam fisher]

if it makes you feel any better, wikipedia is usually only accurate on matters related to buffy the vampire slayer or the like. the rest is a crapshoot as far as i'm concerned h34r:

and thats kinda reinforced by the fact that schools/colleges/etc ban the use of wikipedia, and some even go as far as a blanket ban on the site's url so you can't even reach it from inside the uni I guess they got annoyed that people were quoting that as there source, as the information held there was completely and utterly wrong.

Its fairly good for some physics and math related topics though.

 

[rokdcasbah]

yeah the physics stuff is usually ok (sometimes i find it too dense and unreadable though, but even my dead-tree EB suffers from this with science).

however, anything closer to liberal arts gets crucified. in these cases, there's a lot more to being a good reference than just not getting the facts wrong. basically, i think NPOV is useless...a lot of what i read on wp falls into the "false objectivity" trap in that it sounds objective but really isn't, and basically represents what a limited group of people (mainly the blog community) feels, maybe with a disclaimer preceding the sentence.

for instance, truth "A" is held by one person, opposite truth "B" by another. assuming there's no revert war, the eventual compromise is something like "some people think A" or "select sources show that B, but this is debatable."

sometimes that's warranted, sometimes it isn't. this is where, in the print world, a good author or editor will just pick a side, state their case, and (ideally) reveal their biases.

also sometimes i think it's gay that there's 1 paragraph of text about something, and 5 paragraphs about which simpsons episodes referenced it. i love homer too, but save that shit for snpp.

what we need is a wiki that makes uses of the infinite monkey protocol suite.
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2795.html

anyway, sorry, carry on. (edit: typos)

 

[sam fisher]

I mainly only need the equations from the physics sections.

 

[Gatchan]

Sorry to dig an old topic, but I think it was better to answer here instead of creating a new one.
Is there any public information about the hardware accelerations used in the custom mplayer version?
Squidge wrote he reversed it, but I didn't see anything about it.
The official mplayer version has scanlines and flickering problems (which don't occur on emulators like picodrive or cps2emu), and Open2x also need a new mplayer version. So, being able to create a full open source mplayer version, with mmsp2 acceleration would be great.
Again, sorry for the bump...

 

[Yod4z]

But this player is opensource and based on lib ffmpeg and http://rapidshare.com/files/59084028/gp2x-...r_BETA2.tar.bz2
http://sourceforge.net/projects/libdecoder

 

[Squidge]

Open2X only need port the kernel module, and the hardware accelerated mmplayer will work on Open2X.

 

[Orkie]

Open2X only need port the kernel module, and the hardware accelerated mmplayer will work on Open2X.

I've already had it working on Open2x through compat (which still uses the Open2x kernel) - our problem is more that the libraries needed to built it are so non-standard it is proving quite tricky .

 

[Orkie]

Actually, scrap that - after months of several people trying Lithosphere has finally done it. mp2x now works on Open2x .

 

[sam fisher]

Cool!

 

[Gatchan]

Actually, scrap that - after months of several people trying Lithosphere has finally done it. mp2x now works on Open2x .

Are you using the module provided by dignsys (dualcpu.o), or did you use your own acceleration module?
Squidge : did you publish the undocumented registers used by this module you may have found ?

 

[Squidge]

No, I didn't. What I found wouldn't be of much use to most people. (Nothing really usable).

 

[PokeParadox]

Actually, scrap that - after months of several people trying Lithosphere has finally done it. mp2x now works on Open2x .

Awesome!