[jlark]

Originally Posted by Booxtor

This matter has been discussed for a long time.
And you are of curse right, guys, with your claims.

Hi Booxtor, first of all, it's nice to have you here.

The problem is, Onyx is currently more interested in domestic market (makes currently 80% of their market share). The other 10% is Russia and 10 % the rest of the world. So they don't really care

Well, it's true Europe's population is only half that of China, but the demand for e-ink devices is only gonna grow as they get faster. And when that happens it's up to us, the customers, to make sure the manufacturers and resellers abide by their obligations. If Onyx decides to be a part of it, it's their call.

I am not sure your efforts would be useful for other customers, since it would a) make those rare existing west vendors selling of Onyx devices even more complicated (but would make it easier for Chinese Aliexpress vendors)

Or, in the long run, open up the market for someone willing to respect their customers.

b) would cost really costly engineers time, which they could spend for currently more needed / important things and enhancements.

It is true it would take some time investment on their part, but there are a few things to consider:

1. they gained *an enormous* amount of engineering time, and saved *an enormous* amount of money by using open-source software. The Linux kernel alone was estimated to €2.2 billion, according to pretty old stats, probably past €5 billion by now.

2. once we have access to the code we'll join forces with them and fix their bugs and improve their software. For free. It will more than pay off in time.

3. they'll be doing The Right Thing, morally and contractually.

In entire time I have received 2 or 3 requests for source code (10k customers). It does not seem to be really demanded by users.

2 or 3 developers is nothing to sneer at. Some very succesful software companies have been started with fewer developers.

So I think enforcing of this matter would rather serve to satisfy a very small minority of users, than to help other users.

The point is who that minority of users are. They are the geeks, the tinkerers, the same people that drive technological progress. Their creative output is consumed by the rest of the 10k people. That should be a very important argument, and maybe, just maybe Onyx will understand that it would be a huge win for them to have such people on their side.

Open-source software serves the developers, the consumers, and society as a whole. And the GPL was created to prevent exactly this kind of abusive behaviour exhibited by takers, people who use the labour of others for their own profit without any desire to give back.

The fact that there's only 3 of us that care about such things is a commentary about the sad state of society, not about who gets satisfaction.

It is just my opinion, so please don't throw stones at me. On my side I am trying to do my best. However some problems (like to convince Onyx dev team to collect source code, organize it and make it accessible and proper for western world users) are really hard to get solved and are hardly worth to nag it.

It's good to know that, and thank you for your effort. But really, there isn't all that much they need to do, and they needn't do it all at once. Besides, this should be company policy, not up to the dev team's schedule or preferences, and it would only require them to start with three very simple things to win our hearts:

1. communicate with their customers.

2. make an official statement saying "Sorry guys, we were supposed to give you the source code for X, Y and Z but we didn't. We promise to fix this, but it will take some time, bear with us".

3. as a token of good will, put the kernel online, for all of their devices.

That would really make us happy and allow us to start playing already. Then they can follow up with the bootloader and the rest of the code that is GPL-ed. If at some point they'll want to dump the Android code too, that would be wonderful, and as I said above it would be a net win for them, but in the end they are not required to do so.