British company looks to create cheap, open platforms

I hope his company every success.

Indeed. It's an interesting read, and answers a bunch of questions I've had about chinese hardware and FOSS.

This can start a hardware-oriented virtuous circle, too. If/as these things make into the Maker space, the GPL'd peripherals and extensions (and their drivers and userspace apps) fermented there, fed back upstream when there's broad enough potential usage to justify adding them to the boards or generating plug-compatible peripherals at the factory level, can fit these open platforms into new niche markets. No hassle of getting NDA'd hardware specs and details plus no binary blobs for drivers == no damping of the imagine - invent - implement - tweak loop == loop-gain higher than unity.