Seems to be standard practice for Chinese companies. I like the look of some of Onyx's ebook products, but I've refrained from being tempted as they have been in violation for ages. Unless you are a huge company there is very little you can do. There is probably very little you can do even if you are a huge company. Enforcing our laws & licences over there is nigh on impossible, and appealing to their laws is pointless as the government seems to very openly not care about such violations (some would say their attitude practically <i>encourages</i> such violations) unless they happen against one of their interests. This is not at all specific to open-source licences either.<p>My current phone is a Xiaomi, looks like my next one won't be (it may not have been anyway, due to a list of minor irritations & larger red flags like impossible to uninstall apps and a default clock app that demands full contacts access in order to be able to set an alarm, but this is definitely another point against).
While I have briefly been to China I cannot claim particularly deep knowledge about Chinese culture, customs & values and thus prefer to turn to people with more knowledge & experience, such as a local:<p>Based on this video by Naomi Wu (a.k.a RealSexyCyborg), it's certainly been <i>possible</i> to convince at least one Chinese company to fulfil its obligations under the GPL:<p>* "Getting GPLv2 Compliance From A Chinese Company- In Person!": <<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj04MKykmnQ">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj04MKykmnQ</a>><p>Content Advisory: If you are an employee of YouTube.com the above video may be considered NSFW.<p>(If your own cultural context means you feel compelled to comment on how Naomi chooses to present herself to the world, feel free to watch this explanatory video she has generously provided for your benefit: "Why Do I Look Like...This? The SexyCyborg Origin Story" <<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9vW_MpXTfs">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9vW_MpXTfs</a>>.)
FWIW it is actually worse than it looks like. Even when Xiaomi did/do provide some kernel sources, it's never anywhere near the production code you're running on your smartphone!<p>It's hard to believe, but the "GPL release" they made were actually full clean rewrite of the hardware support made on top of SoC vendor's (say Qualcomm) kernel release. I have a very hard time understanding why they did, but there were definitely inconsistencies that are very hard to explain another way.
What one could possibly do about this? We submitted reports everywhere but even the GNU guys said they could do nothing about it — are licenses even worth anything or it's just a fancy marketing thing today?
Like everything else, licenses are great if you've got the money to take on a behemoth in court. Otherwise you're depending on morality, which tends to take a back seat in big business.
All it takes is someone with standing to sue and win a preliminary injunction cutting off sales in the US. They'll swiftly comply and the case can be dropped. You'd think the EFF and FSF would be interested in pursuing this approach to prove the GPL had teeth.
What did they do and what are the implications? Is that something that every phone company does (having their own kernel version and not sharing it)? Do others use modules? Does this make it possible to easily release a postmarketOS port for recent Xiaomi phones?
GPL doesn’t work unless it can be enforced at a global scale. It hamstrings companies that observe and follow IP law while giving advantages to those that don’t.
With ChatGPT and language models, code licenses are either:<p>- 1. Moot, and therefore language models are fine<p>- 2. Enforceable, and language models will be neutered
It is important to realise, that most cultures do not believe in Intellectual Property the eay 'the West' does.<p>It is not just 'cheating', it is also a matter of significantly different values.<p>Arguably IP laws in the west have gone too far.<p>India was pushing for opening up IP on covid vaccines - the taxpayer paid for their development and deployment, but the profits and IP is private. US has voted against.
Add Unihertz to the list. I'd love to buy a Jelly2 but not with their stock software. I don't understand the dynamics at play and it's hard to not get a bit conspiratorial..