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Lineo Pays To License Real-Time Linux Capability
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Embedded linux vendor Lineo has apparently caved in to Victor Yodaiken, and become the first software company to publicly announce the licensing of Yodaiken's patented process for running a general purpose operating system (such as Linux) as a task under a real-time kernel(such as RTLinux or RTAI)."
There's a special report at LinuxDevices which includes . . .
- text of the Lineo press release
- comments from Victor Yodaiken
- news of a non-patented open source alternative ("Adeos")
- a reference list about RTLinux and the RTLinux patent
- a whitepaper about Adeos
Holy cow, Yoda finally got slashdotted...This guy used to teach at my college. From what I hear, he was an absolute pain in the ass before he got forced out. Good luck to him I guess. I think that half of RT-linux was developed by his students at nmt....
:)
posting as AC so my future teachers don't hate me
First off, I could give a fsck about what Stallman thinks.
Second, your rant is full of if's and but's. If Yodaiken changes the license, but we can't do this. Just be glad that Yodaiken holds the patent and not Micro$oft. Then you'd have no way to use the software at all.
Is it just a matter that nobody has gotten around to it yet or is there a reason why it would be a bad thing?
Just curious...
Perhaps I'm wrong, but:
This License governs the royalty-free use of the process defined by U.S. Patent No. 5,995,745. Anyone can license the use of the Patented Process by agreeing to be bound by the terms of this License. Such person is considered to be the Licensee ("Licensee"). The Patented Process may be used, without any payment of a royalty, with two (2) types of software. The first type is software that operates under the terms of a GPL (as defined later in this License). The second type is software operating under Finite State Machine Labs Open RTLinux (as defined below). As long as the Licensee complies with the terms and conditions of this License and, where applicable, with the terms of the GPL, the Licensee may continue to use the Patented Process without paying a royalty for its use. You may use the Patented Process with software other than the two types mentioned above but you must first obtain a separate license for such use. The first step is to contact Finite State Machine Labs (www.fsmlabs.com).
That reads okay to me. Very similar to the GPL (in a sense). You don't have to pay unless you are charging people for it.
This really could help open-source development - if there is a convenient method to license all this software to be used in for-sale products, companies would be much less likely to just use it and hope no one notices. Its easier to just pay the fee and know that you won't have any legal problems later.
The problem I see is that once people accept this patent as Lineo is doing, what's to stop him from changing the terms of the patent in the future? At that point people would find it difficult to argue with the patent itself, since they previously agreed to it. Maybe I'm just paranoid and/or cynical, but...
I'm working for a company that works with hard real-time systems, ...
WTF is a hard real-time system?...
is it:
a) Pornographic?
b) difficult?
c) rigid?
Shrugs
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
I really like the way this works. It prevents the co-opting of the abstract of the program for commercial use. For example the way IBM's early BIOS was clean-room reverse engineered to provide copyright-free alternatives. When it comes to GPL software I'd be happy to see a commercial entity have to pay to use the underlying idea of a program for commercial closed-source use while the GPL world get's to use it for free.
Can Lineo's version of linux still be considered general purpose? Seems pretty geared towards specific functionality to me. I havne't read the patent, so maybe this is answered already.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Where can I patent the use of 0 and 1 as a representation of logic?
This is an empty argument which Victor has used over and over and over. Take a moment and imagine where the Linux kernel would have been had it been licensed under the same terms ... Nowhere, there's where it would be. If we limit the use of real-time in Linux to free software then no IBM will become involved in its development as has come to be with Linux. This patent effectively kills Linux's integration into the real-time systems market because there is no difference now between using QNX and Linux for real-time systems. You can use QNX's source code and play around with it as long as your project is free, but you have to pay when you use for a product. This is exactly the same thing with Linux. This patent has QNX, VxWorks and others laughing hard at us right now. Does this community really want to support Victor in this endeavour?
You forgot to close your italics tag. A should do nicely.
I KNOW I'm right. And if I'm not, I'm STILL right...
I can't believe this patent is still unchallenged...
It was filed in 1997.
Way before 1997, I was working with a commercial RTOS that ran Windows 3.1 as the lowest priority task.
I would call that prior art... What's wrong here???
Comments anyone???
Well, people were running RT-11 under RSX back around 1979. I also published MSX-11, a distributed MLS system, which had a variant that ran the MLS system as a network in a box, all running under RSX11D. (In that mode it was a test system.) That was published in DECUS #11-SP-6 back about 1979, in source. There are plenty of examples of running an OS under another OS, some even earlier than IBM's work. It was done on pdp8 way earlier, for example. Then too, VM/370 was a full virtual machine, not just os under os. Seems to me such an idea has so many prior implementations it would be tough to sustain, unless the patent is very specialized. As for hooking in realtime handling of various OS signals, that is very well covered in prior art.
What if I decide to do the same thing, just with the BSD-kernel? Will I suddenly become target for a patent license threat, just because this guy hates the BSD-license? How about all the other gazillion variations of licenses, or if I create my own?
Why should he be granted a government controlled and enforced monopoly on such a trivial idea? As you had the brilliance of seeing, having people working for him for free. Why should I join the project or even bother porting it?
I don't believe any means is necessary towards an end, and this is another example of that. Justifying something because it benefits you and your ideals, is a display of ego, narrow-mindedness and lack of understanding and compassion for others. Everyone has many good reasons (and bad ones) to do what they do, even in the corporate world. I know I didn't explain this well, but I hope you got the point.
Btw, how can the GPL and a patent be legally combined? It can not, because the GPL states that further restrictions may not be imposed on the software (not the excact words). Especially not on use. Patents are such a restriction, so this is neither morally nor legally defendable IMHO.
I really wonder why people think this is great, just because it seems to "benefit" free software. I can assure you, it does not. This can further alienate people in the corporate world from the GPL license. But you were going to use force and violence all along weren't you? (talking to those supporting this idea, not the parent poster who was rather sensible)
There is no good side, the only good side is neutral.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Maybe I'm a little naive, but it seems like the patent basically makes any attempt to cash in on the technology null and void, essentially keeping free software free.
I could an uproar if Victor was charging for the license, but he's explicitly not charging it for, and I can see where that would be beneficial.
Patents are a tool. In the wrong hands, they hurt; in the right hands, they don't.
Beware typoes.
Various real time/embedded linux systems are out there, probably one of the easiest to get up and running providing you have pretty standard hardware is hardhat. One needs to be carefull however if wanting to do hard real time, as most of the systems will only provide soft realtime. Finer grain locking and timing, are great -- but it is still soft real time. This is why RT linux is considered different to the patched kernel version out there. It provides "truly hard real-time" functionality, by seperating the general OS tasks from the real time task... That my bit.
software should not be owned ? who said that ? the only reason for copyrighting and patents is to get around the stupid laws which exist to deny people the right to share code. thats the whole point of the free software movement.
You can share all you can muster under public domain. No laws are restricting you. I think you have misunderstood the concept of giving. If you give something with a constraint or expectation, you really haven't given anything at all.
if we patent all our ideas and make em freely available it prevents others from patenting them and locking them up in proprietary licenses. its a way to get around the stupid situation which exists in this country.
Just publicize the ideas and blueprints. It will become prior art, public knowledge and an unrestrictive benefit to the entire society.
and i dont see how hypocrisy has anything to do with the goals of making open source software available to anyone who wants it with the minimum of restrictions..
I wouldn't call it hypocricy, but rather lack of understanding. You see anything that isn't benefiting you as bad and something that is to be avoided. That's sad, for you, because you'll never be happy when you're not giving.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
The patent system is supposed to aid investment and foster non-centralization of ideas.
Who would put money into research in an environment in which the patented subject, once published, is not protected from use without subsidizing the original research?
Patents encourage business diversity and de-centralization. In an patent-free society the organization that would survive is the biggest one (BigCorp) because they can execute the latest ideas most cheaply, undercutting any of those snot-nose startups who dare thinks they have an original idea.
As with anything in this world, patents are a two edged sword. The imbalance in this case is the patenting process versus the legal system. It is more advantageous in a day and age of litigation to stock up with eventually baseless patents as weapons and shields in corporate warfare.
The problem is not with patents. It is with the love of money overriding good moral judgement.
if its public domain others can lock it up under proprietary licenses. or sue you into oblivion. ideas and blueprints are worthless for the average person. this is software meant to be used as widely as possible for the common good.
As far as I can tell, there is nothing wrong with the patent.
It permits free use of the code to anyone who wants to
use it for non commercial purposes, and requires a seperate license for
anyone who wants to use the code to make money. This is how patents
should all be. Rather then the patent holder attempting to create something then extort
insane ammounts of cash from anyone trying to use the technology.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Anyone have experience with one of these real-time Linux systems? How good are they at hard-real time tasks? I'd especially be interested in simulator applications.
That'll be very useful for high-bandwidth multimedia playback, which currently seems to be a problem for some UNIX-based systems such as Mac OS X. Is anyone looking at a Darwin port?
Tim
I dunno, you're both way ahead of me, but I think what he meant was that in certain situations, especially with really complex robots doing really complex things, "15 per second until I say stop" isn't enough. (Though these situations may be more or less common, I have no clue.) For fluid, non-linear movement, you'd be sending so many signals to the microcontroller that its accuracy is wasted when the primary controller is inaccurate.
[Disclaimer: I work for MontaVista, and so am as biased as they come]
Interesting, that is. However, I doubt it'll gain them much.
MontaVista has been doing work on real-time Linux also -- not by putting another layer on top of or underneath the kernel, but by making it highly preemptible. Nigel Gamble (the fellow who did IRIX's real-time capabilities) has put together a patch which permits for some extremely low latencies. There are some other folks here working on the same thing. This has side-benefits for folks running SMP boxen, even if they don't need real-time capabilities, by making the spinlocks much more fine-grained. This patch is truly open source, and will hopefully some day make it into the mainline kernel.
We've recently inked a deal with Concurrent (http://www.ccur.com/corporate/pr/pr_208.html) that real-time folks might find interesting (as Concurrent has some interesting tools) and much of our real-time work has been known to readers of linux-kernel for quite some time. Additionally, our real-time patches are included in the kernels distributed with our products.
Note that I'm on a different project, so my knowledge of the real-time work we do is quite fuzzy. Suffice to say that we've got a highly preemptible Linux kernel already, and that it's still being improved. Hopefully someone else from MontaVista with better direct knowledge will also post.
Years ago, IBM had a realtime system kernel that ran on 360/370/43xx hardware called CP or control program. You ran the os of your choice on a virtual machine presented to you by CP. Oddly enough one of the uses for this was a port of UNIX to 360/370 type hardware. Others were typically VM-CMS for virtual machine cambridge monitor system aka virtual machine conversational monitor system, cics or "kicks" to name a few. Why is this not prior art where in one runs an ordinary os on top of a real time kernel? Why is the Yodaiken patent invalidated by the prior art of IBM? Would IBM license its rights to the same idea and reduction to art to the Linux community now that IBM is big on Linux? Why do we have to tolerate bogus patents and constant shake downs by those with the bogus patents. I thought the burden of showing the non-existance of prior art was on the potential patent filer and not the rest of us. Just asking. Does anyone else know of similar but different prior art for the so-called new idea of running an os as a task on a realtime kernel? Basically I am for innovation but it has the odd property that it has to be new.
The GPL does NOT infect ANYTHING, EVER. Not even in any symbolic sense.
The GPL simply says that you can only use my GPL'ed code in your program if your code is also GPL'ed. You are completely free to not use my code. Yet so many people like you seem to feel that you should have the right to use my code under terms I never agreed to.
If I offer you a free ice cream cone... you would do well to not later accuse me of ruining your diet. Your diet is your problem. I didn't shove the ice cream cone down your throat.
And GPL'ed code doesn't infect other code.
-- laws are the opinions of politicians --
What is wrong with doing research on a contract basis rather than with patent licenses to repay the investment?
Additionally, software patents are *always* bad because writing software is something that anyone can participate in. (zero cost of entry) Furthermore anything resembling an algorithm is only a piece of mathematical knowledge and should not be patentable.
You suggest that a patent-free society would hurt startups. I would argue that startups can still copyright a specific implementation, market their products better, conduct business more efficiently than their big competitors, etc. If their competitors play dirty games, then you have a case for anti-trust.
I think the problem IS with patents because the love of money WILL override moral judgment. You can't change human nature. Maybe we should have patents, but if it was up to me, about 90% of them would be thrown out as trivial.
It looks closed to me. I did "view source" and verified it was there.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The problem with this, besides the fact that the claim is a very broad one which covers software which other people might want to write, is that it perpetuates the idea of the GPL as being like a virus. I happen to agree. The GPL attempts to infect software in such a way that it dictates what an author may or may not do with their own software. You may agree or disagree with this. What this patent case does is far worse. This is *not* a case of a software author having the choice to infect their code with the GPL and make use of someone else's code in their project, or having the choice *not* to infect their code with the GPL and simply write all their own code, or else go find code to use that isn't covered by the GPL. This is about someone who believes in the GPL so much that they want to extend to software they haven't even written. The patent holder wishes to construe his patent so broadly as to force all programmers anywhere who wish to develop certain kinds of software to be covered by the GPL. That is truly bad. I don't personally like the GPL, but I understand that all those who put their software under the GPL have the right to do so, and all those who use software covered by the GPL do so understanding the legal consequences, and that's their freedom of choice. But trying to *force* others to make their software be under the GPL whether they want to or not is truly despotic. Software patents are wrong, whether it's a company like Microsoft trying to force some company under the Microsoft Hegemony, or some GPL fanatic trying to force someone else under the GPL hegemony. I think the supports of Free Software, and the supporters of Open Source software, should stand for, at the very least, personal freedom, and the right of an individual to write code as they see fit and to license it as they see fit. Forceful tendencies are reminiscent of the company practices of some companies which we always seem to portray as the "enemy". Have we become the enemy?
They'd be welcome, particularly in Britain, where the government have explictly come out anti-software patent...
"hard" real-time only refers to a guaranteed response time being crucial for the success or failure of a given application. That response time could be three days, or it could be three nano-seconds. While a "hard" real-time operating system that guarantees a "millisecond" response may not be suitable for an application that requires a "microsecond" response, that does not mean that it should be labeled as "soft" real-time. An application is hard or soft, a real-time implementation merely provides a guarantee and is not in and of itself hard or soft.
I must be missing something. How is it possible to patent the general category of mechanisms for running an OS under a RT OS? These products have been around for decades. MVS not only allowed running an OS, it would provide an entire emulation of the hardware that the OS wanted to run on.
Lower latency is a fine and useful thing for a number of things. But don't make the mistake of confusing low latency with hard realtime.
If I am driving a robot's servo controller using software to close the PID loop, I have to send now positions exactly at the servo rate, or the robot will "jerk", a potentially dangerous situation. If I am using the MontaVista low-latency patch, I still have no guarantee that I will be able to send out position updates at the servo rate. If Linux decides to swap out Netscape to disk, or someone hits eth0 with a ping flood, my robot will end up hitting the side of the workcell, and people might be hurt or killed.
If I am playing Quake, and Linux decided to swap Netscape out to disk, or someone hits eth0 with a ping flood, my frame rate my go down a little bit. With the low latency latches, it might go down a little less.
The point is, low latency does not provide any sort of a guarantee on response time. This is why we have things like RTLinux and RTAI -- to provide guaranteed reponse times for timing critical event handling.
-Erik -- --This message was written using 73% post-consumer electrons--
This will make both RMS and WHG spin in their graves. Oh..wait. Would someone please kill RMS and WHG?
Geekizoid: The Small Shiny Things Network ©
Gobble a dick!
It might well hurt. But because of the GPL, companies will simply have no choice. With the GPL poised to destroy any market at any time, it is simply a foolish business proposition to publish commercial software without patent protection.
You see, this is one of the biggest problems with the GPL. It is a weapon of war: Richard Stallman's personal vendetta against all commercial software vendors. Wars cause casualties and collateral damage. People get hurt -- often the wrong people. We would all be better off if programmers understood this risk, considered the consequences of their actions, and eschewed the GPL.
And it would help if you actually read the documents for which links are provided.
/different/ hard-real-time linux technology, RTAI.
What Lineo has done is paid for the right to tell customers "Yes, the Yodaiken patent is not a problem, it's been taken care of" when offering a
Lineo doesn't use, and doesn't plan to use, RTLinux. They're heavily vested in RTAI. Just got tired of customers asking "What about the Yodaiken patent?!"
You'd know that, if you'd read more than the submission.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
They are all posted by anonymous cowards therefore they start with a score of zero. Please read the faq. None of them have been modded down, they just haven't been modded UP.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Man actually I shouldn't respond to this post.
*) It has NOTHING to do with the topic, you just used a fade opportunity to say your opinion, okay, but I hope it doesn't grow out the an old discussion, on the wrong place.
*) it is simply a foolish business proposition to publish commercial software without patent protection.
Well do you know what options you've if you want to "protect" you're software from beeing spread? Well there are Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks and Tradesecrets. Of course a patent can be an effective way, but most of the time (99%) you'll simply not in the position to get one, or you things maybe the PR isn't worth it.
*) I agree about you're oppinion of war, but there is something different if you think if you're fighting what you think that's your right. In example if people wouldn't have gone to the street, woman would still have no rights. I think that I've the right to see the Source of what I'm running on my system, and I think I've the right to modify it and to give it my friends. One can argue that right is not appropriate, that's a discussion itself. But the same one can argue that woman don't have suffrage. Something cleanly offtopic today, but not so in 1900. It's evolotion we're experiencing here, and none can stop it, maybeGates&co decelerate it, but whatever MS does or what the GPL is or not, ie. the linux kernel hackers will not say: "Yes, know we see, they're actually right, let's scrap that whole source, let's all buy XP, and then we'll go fishing the rest of the year." *) We would all be better off if programmers understood this risk, considered the consequences of their actions, and eschewed the GPL.
Okay I guess you mean it's dangerous because programmers are no longer be payed to rewrite things dozends of people have done prior? Then programming has become and end in itself. This is contro evolotionary and will be wiped away eitherway from the rules of life. It doesn't matter actually how much ie. ms earns by selling software. The software will have to be written eitherway, and there are people that are willing to pay to get software written. If it means if a job is completed because we all have one day all an OS we're quite happy with, (or an office packet) then it's simply completed, to pay people to reinvent everything just because it's another company that wants some issues different is contra-benifit for an community as whole. They should do something different. They idea of economy is not to keep people busy at any price, but to find the most effective way to do things.
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Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Okay one shouldn't respond to his own post, I'm sorry for the grammar, didn't notice -how- lousy it is. It's quite late in the night and I'm tired, guess I shouldn't write any comments today.
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Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
It doesn't matter whether this patent is used to protect free software or whether the inventor allows GPL'ed software to use it, it is still a bad patent. It also doesn't matter that commercial entities are using patents that are just as bogus.
Now, a portfolio of good, strong patents used in this way might, in fact, help free software.
You obviously did not read/understand the article. This is a hybrid-license. It combines the GPL and Commercial approaches to software licensing. Basically it rewards people who don't charge for their software by not charging them in return. And on the other side it charges people a fee to use it's technology when they in turn charge other people to use it. I see this as absolutely fair and really the best of both worlds. The commercial end is NOT forced to place their software under the GPL they can license it just like any other piece of commercial code. The only technical flaw I can perceive in this hybrid approach is that the originator of the software is able to reap increasing returns on the value of the software licensed to commercial users as the GPL user community improves the software.
That's nice, CmdrTaco on.
Free it is not. Freedom does not entail being bound by a license. You are slaving for the man, and like it! Eventually you will realize you have placed yourself at bottom of the pole, at the end of the trough.
Or at least, that's how I thought the distinction went.
No, both the running-Linux-as-a-process and kernel pre-emption techniques offer the same 'hard' real-time guarantees of scheduling latency. Obviously, they differ in their approach.
The Linux-as-a-process technique that Yodaiken has patented is both simpler to understand and implement. A small, new real-time kernel (the RTLinux kernel) runs the standard Linux kernel as a normal process. Real-time applications are written for the RTLinux kernel (there is a thunking layer which allows Linux processes to use RTLinux syscalls), and when a realtime application needs to service an event, the RTLinux kernel can interrupt Linux and schedule the realtime application instead. The major downside of this approach is that calling RTLinux syscalls from a Linux application involves this thunking layer, which is by its nature, somewhat costly and slow. It also means realtime programmers have an extra API to worry about.
The pre-emptible kernel approach, on the other hand, does away with an external kernel, by making the Linux scheduler itself able to interrupt and reschedule kernel code as well as the normal userspace code. If an event arrives that must be serviced within a certain timeframe, then the Linux scheduler simply stops whatever else the Linux kernel is doing and services the request. This is a much harder approach to get right, especially as it involves some significant redesign of the way kernel-space code is treated. However, ultimately, I think it is the more elegant solution, and it means that there need not be a thunking layer or extra API - existing realtime applications suddenly become able to do 'hard' realtime.
Note that 'hard' realtime is not necessarily about responding to events quickly, but merely that these events can be dealt with in a guaranteed time frame, which could range from microseconds to seconds. In practice, 'hard' realtime does usually mean fast however. 'Soft' realtime scheduling, such as what the standard Linux kernel offers, makes a best-effort attempt to reduce scheduling latency to a minimum, but does not provide a guarantee that an event will be dealt with within a certain time. In 'soft' realtime, a realtime event is ignored until any kernel code that is currently running reaches its next instruction to deliberately yield - rather like the way userspace code is treated under a co-operative multitasking OS.
Perhaps you were getting confused with the low-latency patches for the Linux kernel? These attempt to reduce realtime scheduling latency in the Linux kernel by adding extra points where the currently-running code is told to yield back to the scheduler (and also by tweaking some of the kernel algorithms). However, this does not mean that the scheduler can interrupt kernel code. Thus it represents merely an improvement on Linux's normal 'soft' realtime scheduling and not 'hard' realtime at all.
I'm surprised that Lineo paid to license this patent. There's prior art -- for example, Intel's real-time kernel that ran beneath Windows 3.1. They were showing this off in the late 80's-early 90's, as I recall, at the Embedded Systems Conference.
Visit realtimelinux.org for proper definitions of real time...
-Erik -- --This message was written using 73% post-consumer electrons--
I'd hate to see BigSoftwareCompany sue the pants off an author because they wrote something that worked just like their patented underlying idea. "Not only are we protecting this IP, we're protecting anything that sort of looks like it"
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
If Open Source developers start getting bogus software patents in the name of anti-commercialism, it's just going to start a big pissing contest as proprietary software companies will follow suit and try to grab up as many software patents as they can now before the next guy gets them. What we need is to put an end to patents altogether. They had their time, but are now only a roadblock to innovation in the modern age of computers, biotechnology, and instant dissemination of ideas. The world is a small place, while ideas are in infinite supply. Why are we still fighting?