> "Allwinner would be pretty foolish not to fully fund this endeavour"
Why would they fund it? If they saw the potential benefits, they could probably open source their own closed source drivers and avoid this Kickstarter being needed, or at the very least provide documentation to speed this work along.
Patents for what? Algorithms? I've heard similar arguments/excuses made before, I'd like to understand if there's any legal precedence for them, or if it's more of a hypothetical risk.
Lastly, with the 'supply of documentation' approach, does this (to your knowledge) carry the same legal risks?
The third-party is probing into a black box. They have no idea what is or isn't there. So it could be plausible deniability on the side of the chipmaker.
How about documentation then? Let's say Allwinner releases C header files, plus high level descriptions of what each function does. Do they still maintain plausible deniability if the hardware design infringes on patents?
It means they don't need to get lawyers involved to check for any licencing gotchas from other non-free code in the tool chain. They might see it as a liability or reveals other tangentially related proprietary details of their tooling. There may not be much formal documentation, and if there is it would likely need to be combed through, updated, translated, etc.
Even without getting lawyers involved, I don't see how they could do any of the above tasks for less than the price of this Kickstarter.
> "It means they don't need to get lawyers involved to check for any licencing gotchas from other non-free code in the tool chain."
They don't need to open source the whole toolchain, just the parts of the code they own/wrote themselves. For the parts of the toolchain they can provide documentation (writing it out if this documentation needed to be created/revised) to fill in the missing pieces.
> "I don't see how they could do any of the above tasks for less than the price of this Kickstarter."
You seem to be overlooking that reverse engineering hardware drivers is a hugely inefficient process. People only do it out of necessity. Furthermore, the Kickstarter has set modest goals of enhancing the work that has already been done (MPEG2 acceleration, etc...), the end result is not a driver that can be used for more general purpose graphics acceleration (e.g. no OpenGL driver). That's not to say it isn't a good step forward, I welcome it, but you should be aware that there's a long road ahead after the work for the Kickstarter has been completed. If you don't believe me, look at the ongoing work being done by the Nouveau team.
Why would they fund it? If they saw the potential benefits, they could probably open source their own closed source drivers and avoid this Kickstarter being needed, or at the very least provide documentation to speed this work along.