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Lineo Pays To License Real-Time Linux Capability

Posted by timothy on from the now-how-much-would-you-pay?- dept.

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."

1 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. I'm not seeing a problem here... by joshamania · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.