Naomi Wu
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2021–2024
11:30 · 625K views · Aug 26, 2021
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.
Held up as a rare success story of GPL enforcement against a Chinese hardware company, and admired for the effort.
5 comments from Hacker News
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
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 video she has generously provided for your benefit: "Why Do I Look Like...This? The SexyCyborg Origin Story" < [LINK] >.)
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
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 I am quick to assume people are grifters. Particularly for sites with no social proof established by reputation from a wide userbase and a convincing 'about us' with actual people's bios and real contact information. I get irrationally angry about for-profit license violations of 'free-ish' intellectual property, because of how hard capitalists come down on people like Aaron Swartz, Kim Dotcom, and scores of teenagers using Napster or Bittorrent when I was young. So I plunge a bit deeper into them than is rational. I strongly identify with superficially irrational efforts like Naomi Wu's[2]. 0: [LINK] / [LINK] 1: [LINK] 2: this video
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