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

There's an interesting quote where Yodaiken claims his patent will help open source."

Comments

I'm not seeing a problem here...

[joshamania]

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.

I love it.

[BlenderHead-2001]

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.

Re:Not the only (or best) game on the market

[plastik55]

As far as I understood it, MontaVista and FSM Labs aren't even in the same ballpark -- MontaVista's technology allows for running a normal Linux process with very low input/output latencies, on the order of a couple milliseconds. This is great for multimedia applications, particularly where you need immediade auditory-visual feedback from the user's actions without any perceptible delay, without doing a lot of OS-specific coding.

RTLinux on the other hand is designed for hard real-time scheduling with microsecond latencies, but you have to write your programs for the RTLinux kernel (which runs Linux as a subprocess.) Which is great for industrial and scientific control/data acquisition applications, where you need to be guaranteed not to screw up the precise timing of your large deadly instrument, and can pay for custom programming.

Or at least, that's how I thought the distinction went.