Getting GPLv2 Compliance From A Chinese Company- In Person!

Naomi Wu · 624K views · 2021 · 11:30

Open on YouTube

Software practice, open source & careersConsumer devices & gadgetsLinux & open-source ecosystemscommentary

Why Hacker News recommends it

Held up as a rare success story of GPL enforcement against a Chinese hardware company, and admired for the effort.

What it is

Naomi Wu visits the Shenzhen offices of smartphone maker UMIDIGI in person to get them to release source code they owed under the GPLv2, and they comply.

Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2021 to 2024.

What Hacker News said

Strong rec Hackbraten · 2023-06 · on “They just pirated my open source 8088 BIOS”

A Chinese YouTuber has traveled to a company who wouldn’t take the GPL seriously [0]. I wish more people had the nerve to do that instead of letting it slide. [0]: [this video]

Recommends BostonEnginerd · 2021-12 · on “Boox Mira Pro – 25.3" E Ink Monitor”

I saw the original video on the Twitters, but didn't check out the followup until now. I'm thrilled that her visit worked and that the files were posted! [this video]

Recommends follower · 2023-03 · on “Xiaomi has been in violation of GPL for years”

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: Based on this video by Naomi Wu (a.k.a RealSexyCyborg), it's certainly been possible to convince at least one Chinese company to fulfil its obligations under the GPL: * "Getting GPLv2 Compliance From A Chinese Company- In Person!": < [this video] > Content Advisory: If you are an employee of YouTube.com the above video may be considered NSFW. (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 v

Cites StingyJelly · 2023-06 · on “They just pirated my open source 8088 BIOS”

It might be that in China there's not a strong opensource culture. Here's a video from Naomi Wu dragging umidigy into compliance where she talks about the issue. [this video]

Cites reaperman · 2024-02 · on “License University of Michigan's Databases of Academic Speech and Student Papers”

I did very much appreciate your appreciation. Mostly though I was just a bit more thorough than others would be. If I was clever at all, it was only in identifying what exactly would be best to copy/paste. I keyed in on ' Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English ' and ' Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers ' on this page[0] and the simplest copy/paste google searches led me directly to the UMich page for the datasets which share that exact name[1]. I did notice the rest of the details were identical, but honestly had already lost good-faith and stopped 'evaluating' once I saw the perfectly matching dataset names. I have very little faith in the tech / SaaS industry, and generally