Allwinner
Allwinner is a fabless SoC developer based in Zhuhai, in the Guangdong province in China. It is best known for making low cost chips for low cost tablets and other low cost android devices.
SoCs
A full rundown of Allwinner SoCs is provided on the Allwinner SoC Family page.
Sunxi community participation
With an increased importance of cheap ARM development boards, and the size and activity of the sunxi community, Allwinner started to take notice of our community. They were beginning to show signs of opening up to linux-sunxi, and direct communication was becoming possible, giving us all hope of better future support of Allwinner SoCs. Sadly, these hopes were crushed when Allwinner joined linaro, ticked their "open source" marketing box, and cut off communication altogether.
Allwinner does not participate in or support the linux-sunxi community, they do not even meet basic open source license hard requirements.
See also: Allwinner upstream requests/efforts
Linaro membership
In march 2014, Allwinner joined Linaro as part of the new linaro digital home group. After this, Allwinner stopped communicating with the sunxi community, as linaro membership apparently satisfies the marketing need to be seen as an open source friendly company. Despite linaro membership, Allwinner still violates the GPL on many counts.
GPL violations
For more information on Allwinner's grave and increasing violations of the GPL on both u-boot, kernel and userspace binaries, check our GPL violations page.