It might be better in principle — though shitty code is only so much different from unmodifiable code — but it turned out to be the best compromise available in practice. The boards put out by the Foundation were cheap and good enough for our purpose. Of course we'd have liked to go with our own boards. We actually designed and commissioned a small batch of builds using the H5. But then we saw the software provided by Allwinner. It was so fragile, it wouldn't even boot correctly a second time. Looking at the code itself revealed it to be a nightmare. And at that time (over a period of three months) there was no software freedom to be had since the only software that would even boot at all was the shitty dump. We'd have had to wait a year or two for the code to get usable or clean, and by that time both Allwinner would have moved on from the H5 (as we were told) and our product would have been too late to market.