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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
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?
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.
That sounds okay... the patent is licensed freely for use in any GPLed software. This would appear to conform to the GPL's provisions about patents (basically, you may not distribute the program without also granting a licence for any applicable patents) and it looks reasonable from common sense.
It's not demanding any special fee for commercial use, so it counts as free software still (aka Open Source etc etc).
At least, from the paragraph you quoted above everything seems fine. It would still be better for everyone if patent offices would refrain from granting monopolies on abstract ideas however...
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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--
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.