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MandrakeSoft Buys Bochs, LGPLs It
Direct from the mouth of Gael Duval, we've gotten word that MandrakeSoft (Yes, the folks who make Mandrake-Linux. No, it has nothing to do with Mandrake of Enlightenment fame. ) have purchased Bochs and hired Kevin Lawton. Now that Bochs is LGPLed, the Plex86 development can be speed up as well.
Please.
Too bad lawyers don't donate their time and expertise like OS programmers do!
Actually, they do. It's called working pro-bono and it seems to be something that most lawyers do at least some of the time. In fact, it might even be the case that a larger fraction of lawyers have worked pro bono at some point in their life than OS programmers!
Ah, now _I've_ been misunderstood. I don't think anyone should be compelled to license their code any particular way. Lawton had a source-available commercial thing going for a long time, and I didn't begrudge him that in the least.
The part that rubbed me the wrong way was when he put "I'll change the license for this if you give me a job" on the Bochs site. Not that he's not entitled to do that, but it seems counter to the concept of the Open Source universe to use the promise of a license as a bargaining chip for the author's benefit. It kind of misses the point of the sharing thing Open Source is all about, and just feels wrong to me.
(*shrug) I'm very happy for him, and I'm glad Bochs is LGPL'ed; I'm totally glad his work has paid off for him, in aplomb and in dollars. I just can't help feeling the whole thing is a little bit... underhanded or something.
Hmmn, I can't find the right words, but I did want to pipe up and say that I'm _not_ an Open Source Marxist, and I totally agree with your attitude about paying the rent. I just think that there's a right way to Open-Source-license things, if you're going to go that route, and I don't think this was necessarily done in that Right Way. That's all.
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My Freakin Blog
It might not help WINE directly, but it might be interesting to build a smart launcher for Windows software. If the executable is known to work well under WINE, use WINE (which would be faster). Otherwise, use BOCHS, which would provide better emulation at the expense of relatively slow execution.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
If you want to require the developer to give back changes to your code, yet still allow it to be used as part of proprietary programs without the technical difficulties of the LPGL, the MPL is a good alternative.
QT is themable.
KDE2.0 adds makes it easier to theme. (with their theme engine -- allowing gradients and such.)
As for C++, some would say that it is a benefit.
Besides, there _are_ bindings for perl and python. There also exists some C bindings, but they are for an old version of QT.
Once you bring KDE's xmlrpc stuff into the picture, any language can be used.
-- Thrakkerzog
Most of the anti-copyright crowd do seem to be pro-GPL which strikes me as inconsistent , since the GPL is a copyright ( a lot of the anti-RIAA noise is made by people who completely oppose any kind of copyright protection ) . They usually try to push the (false) theory that the GPL wouldn't be necessary in the absence of copyright.
So yes, there are a lot of hypocrites on slashdot ( even though you don't appear to be one of them ).
I think this is really great news. Emulators are important because they will allow us to access current data and programs long past the time when the hardware that ran it has stopped being made. And putting Bochs under GPL or LGPL will likely cause it to be much more widely used and ensure long term maintenance and enhancements. Great job and kudos to both Kevin and the people at Mandrake!
I do not debate your claim that the CPU design itself is probably copyrighted. If I tried to fab some Pentium 120s in the local pizza oven, I should expect to be sued. However, the instruction set itself is not necessarily copyrighted. Considering that it has been restated many times over in documentation, I doubt they can claim any ownership over it anymore, if they ever did.
If Intel had such a powerful claim with regards to the x86 architecture, do you think I could be sending this from a K6-2 today?
It's hard to go an entire day without seeing some Slashdotter raging at the RIAA for trying to protect their investments. For people here to question any other company ripping off GPL'd code is more than a little hypocritical. The typical Slashdotter is far from having the moral high ground on any IP issues.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I'd be more receptive to your argument, but the premise on which you're basing it is completely false. People overall around here don't complain about the RIAA frowning on the free trade of MP3s because they're looking to collect MP3s of songs for which they already own the disc. Unless you're in denial, then you know that. They're complaining because, like warez kiddies, they think it's okay to download whatever song they feel like, artist/record company/etc. be damned. If that is the kind of ethics they have, I'm not going to stop them, but spare me the angst and tears when someone brings up the possibility of a company ripping off GPL'd code.
Just to make it clear, I'm not saying that you download things for which you already own the disc, but you have to know that you're way in the minority around here.
On a final note, who is the stupid gimp that marked my original post as "Offtopic?" I replied directly to the poster's comments about the possiblity of people ripping off GPL software. If you didn't mark his as offtopic, I'm curious how you decided that my post was. Oh well, for being a site where so many people profess their individuality, there sure do seem to be an awful lot of people who can't wait to squelch any posts which don't conform to the Slashdot Groupthink.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Actually, both are significant, but the relicensing is far more significant. Granted Lawton could do what he wanted with his code, but the rest of us couldn't. Now we can. And the fact that Mandrake purchased Bochs is extraordinarily significant. Relicensing it will greatly speed up plex86 development. There is now the potential in the near future for an open source application that can do what VMWare can do. Mandrake wants to be the complete solution for users migrating from Windows to Linux. They've done a great job thus far, and this is another step very much in line with their strategy.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
He means that they may have lifted some Linux code and put it in Windows 2000 either verbatim or as a derivative work. This is illegal. Linus did not illegally take any code from any Unix. The point is not that Windows 2000 lifted the "invention" from Linux but that they may have illegally taken code.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Because if you run windows than there is a whole lot more going on. Look at what Corel is doing with WINE, they run their Linux Office Suite in it, and the reviews I've read say it preforms very well( although this is without using emulation). Next look at VMware, it uses up many many more system resources to get an almost perfect windows environment at about half speed, once again still no emulation. The other issue is RAM, to get VMware to run well for me I have to give it at least 64meg of RAM, while a single app would only need a fraction of that. WINE is also meant as a library for doing native ports of code, so even if you wanted to just run all of windows it's a worthwhile project to keep around.
treke
Lawton owned bochs. Lawton could have relicensed bochs at any time if he felt it was needed- why didn't he? Because of the money. Lawton has to eat, and therefore stated that he'd keep bochs as a revenue source. It isn't significant that bochs is being relicensed, it is significant that Lawton was hired.
-bugg
Too bad lawyers don't donate their time and expertise like OS programmers do!
Isn't that what the ACLU is for? Read the THE FINANCIAL PICTURE at bottom of their info page
- passion
I hope that in a year or two MandrakeSoft will be a major Open Source player. So far they proven to me that they are moving in the right direction.
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Mike
Actually, they're getting around to it
cat
Though I know VMWare would never do such a thing, I just thought I'd bring it up to see what you guys thought of the possibility.
Too bad lawyers don't donate their time and expertise like OS programmers do!-Dan (danpbrowning@email.com)
Daniel
Could any of the more Linux/Emulator scene savvier programmers out there give us a bit of an idea as to whether or not this will help the Wine effort at all, or is it tangential to the effort to getting Win32-code working in Linux?
(I would think its tangential, but not sure...)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
make deal -> press release -> slashdot -> sign legal agreements -> update official home page
sure, that makes sense.
How we know is more important than what we know.
While Linux users are happy at the GPLing of the software, BeOS and other alternative OS users (BTW. Linux is getting to the point where BeOS is to Linux as Linux used to be to Windows :) should be happy for the code merge. Because Bochs has already been ported to many platforms (Be), if Plex86 uses bochs for the core, then it should be pretty easy to get Plex86 working on BeOS. This will have to be done by BeOS developers since Plex86 doesn't have any plans for supporting non-UNIX OSs, but I'm sure there are enough of those.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
That's what Open Source is about, after all.
If they take it unmodified, they're within LGPL.
If they take it and modifiy it, they have to distribute the mods under LGPL. Under GPL it infects their code if they use more than a Fair Use worth. (Isn't that about 10 lines.)
If they get in a situation where they are supposed to distribute all their source, and don't, they're on borrowed time. Piss off a developer and he might blow the whistle. Then the owners of the original copyright(left) can sue for the rest of the source, and use discovery to pry out internal documents to prove the case.
Who knows how the courts will rule - but it's a big risk to the company, so they'll probably try to keep it clean, least they get raked over the coals and maybe catch fire. Courts tend to favor the little guy if his story is good and his lawyer doesn't screw up. And Copyleft is set up so anything that breaks it proabably also breaks the parts of IP law that let the proprietary software people write and license their own stuff. B-)
Remember that copyright violation penalties, unlike most civil penalties, are puntative and draconian (at least partly to make up for the low probability of getting caught), not limited to the damages directly incurred by the copyright holder.
Meanwhile the whole software species improves, and the proprietary shops have about a 5-to-1 disadvantage in development speed, so they'll keep falling behind even with cannibalization.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
According to the recently-passed Digital Millenium Copyright Act, it is illegal to develop, posess, or traffick in software whose primary purpose is the subversion of copyrights. This is a known legal fact: courts in California and New York have already issued injunctions agains distributors of DeCSS, a tool designed to break the DVD encryption system. Now, the primary purpose of Bochs, and its companion plex86, seems to be the emulation of the Intel instruction set, thus alleviating the need for an actual Central Processing Unit. However, this has legal ramifications: Intel's CPU (and by extension, instruction set) is copyrighted. Using Bochs allows you to execute programs which use Intel's copyrighted instructions without an actual processor, much in the way that DeCSS allows you to view a DVD without a DVD player. It is not a giant leap therefore, to suppose that as Bochs and DeCSS serve a similar purpose, they should have the same legal status. In accordance with this principle, it becomes obvious that the possession, development, or trafficking of Bochs is illegal under the laws of the US.
I am asking, then, that all law-abiding Slashdot readers (which are perhaps a minority given the anarchistic leanings of Linux users), to cease the use, development, and distribution of Bochs and similar copyright-defeating programs. In the end, it will probably save you from a lawsuit from Intel's (well funded) legal team. This is not a threat, but rather a warning. The Open Source Community must realize that you do not have free reign to develop just any software you please, but rather only that which is in strict accordance with he laws. MandrakeSoft is placing itself in a position which you certainly don't want to be yourself, you can bet on that.
It's significant because the Bochs project itself is still valid separate from plex86 -- Bochs allows x86 emulation on non-x86 platforms, while plex86 uses native x86 instructions wherever possible for the best performance.
Bochs is very very cool, and having it Freely available is a Very Good Thing, Indeed.
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