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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.
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. --
It's legal to study GPLed code to determine the algorithms and protocols, and duplicate them in proprietary code, as long as the proprietary code is not a derivative work. The safe way to do this is the "cleanroom procedure": engineer A studies the code and writes up a report on how it does what it does; engineer B, who has never seen the code, writes a new version based on the report. Really paranoid companies have a lawyer check the report and filter communication between A and B.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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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