RK2020 Voids Software Licenses

Occasionally I get an email from China asking if I want to review something retro related. This time it was a retro inspired handheld. Sure thing! Send it!

When I received the unit I started with the manual. It was one sheet of paper, with on one side the instructions in Chinese, on the other side the same thing in English. All pretty standard stuff, until I got to the part explaining how to upgrade to firmware.

It said: “Google the word EmuELEC”. Wait, what?

That’s weird. Why wouldn’t they just link to the homepage of EmuELEC? Googling EmuELEC brought me to its GitHub page. Nice. Reading through the page I found the software’s licence:

[…]the distro includes many non-commercial emulators/libraries/cores/binaries and as such, it cannot be sold, bundled, offered, included, or anything similar, in any commercial product/application including but not limited to: Android Devices, Smart-TVs, TV-boxes, Hand-held Devices, Computers, SBCs, or anything else that can run EmuELEC.

What’s going on here? The Github page has a link to a Discord channel. Time to hop on to get answers.

It didn’t take long for someone of the staff to answer my question if they officially supported the RK2020 handheld. The short answer–No, they do not. For more details check out the video.

NOTE: To my knowledge newer version of the RK2020 and later models no longer ship with EmuELEC.

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