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IP Theft in the Linux Kernel
"They just took my code and filed off the copyright" said Søren. "This is clearest with the two header files hptraid.h and pdcraid.h. Compare these with FreeBSD's ata-raid.h, and just look at the similarities." And it's true that these two header files certainly look like a chopped up copy of the FreeBSD header, after a quick search-and-replace. "The reading of the RAID config from the disks is their own code, but is clearly "inspired" from our code," said Søren, "but that's encouraged by the license. It's the verbatim use of the other code without retaining the copyright that's the problem."
ata-raid.h, and the other files, are copyright Søren, and released under the three clause BSD license, which includes the restriction "Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice". So using these files, or significant portions of them, in your own code, without retaining the copyright information, as has happened here, is prohibited.
You may be thinking "This is only a couple of header files, what's the big deal?". As Søren says "The problem here is that the structures in the headers is the whole story. That info tells how you read the proprietary struct off the disks, and was reverse engineered and documented by me after a lot of effort." Søren's intellectual property is tied up in those files.
Right now, Søren is in discussions with the authors of the Linux ATA drivers (employed by RedHat) to ensure that his copyright notice is returned to these and other files, and to ensure that this situation does not recur. And it is hoped that an amicable solution can be reached.
Hey AC-
Where did you guys work?
-sting3r
BSD is still very much alive and kicking.
Hey Taco - Where are the Quickies? I haven't seen ANY in quite sometime (and I could usually find a couple things in there to lighten my day)
I wish I understood how the hell this comment got moderated up at all, much less as "insightful".
It's basically a fucking "me too" post a la USENET, 1994 -- "me, too" because this IS a Linux advocacy site.
Is it on-topic? Does it add to the discussion? Hardly.
My bet is this 8th grade karma-whore (who's his pimp?) either has a bunch of accounts and modded himself up, or has a buddy with mod points today.
woof.
No, you don't.
and I think I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community at the moment.
No, you can't.
I believe that part of the reason that open source based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying technology.
Broad statement. Incorrect. IBM and HP back/develop Linux, Dell sells Linux servers, etc, etc. The Gartner Group just recommended against using IIS. Cobalt and RedHat hardly failed as "Linux startups." Most linux code is portable in one way or another if its correctly written. Open Source has proven and will continue to prove that software should cost nothing. (Given that Mickeysoft doesn't accept liability, its essentially worthless.
I know that that's a strong statement to make,
No, its idiotic.
but I have evidence to back it up!
No, you don't.
At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult for, we wanted to integrate Linux into our server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing fees was too great to ignore. I recommended [SIC]the installation of several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of serving HTTP requests, DNS, and file serving.
So you went your own way and installed your own kernel, not using the default kernel or default kernel sources from a particular distribution. You failed to mention the distribution. High performance DNS is best outsourced for large companies try www.ultradns.com. You did no qualifying as 2.4.9 is fresh out of the ftp. The Gartner group recommended against the use of IIS, which owns a mere 25% of that market. 60% is apache. http://www.netcraft.com/survey/. Fileserving is trivial, and Linux offers a myriad of FS choices, XFS (SGI), JFS(IBM), Reiser, ext2, ext3, for various needs. From true logging/journaling to simple filesystems. Most of the time, Samba drastically outperforms NT/2000 boxes with the SMB protocol.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming.
You aren't. Delusion.
I don't believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code that's every bit as fast.
Troll. C doesn't believe in making it easy for morons, sorry you were left out of the loop.
I took it upon myself to configure the system from scratch and even used an optimised [SIC] version of gcc 3.1 to increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3 machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say the results were less than impressive...
GCC 3.1 isn't out yet. 3.01 is. The kernel documentation tell you to use EGCS 1.1.2 / GCC 2.91.66, but you can't read. I've had not problems with Linux 2.4.3 - 1.4.10 with gcc 3.00 or 3.01, nor with Mozilla 0.93/0.94, nor with any other things I have compiled with GCC on Linux. The processes will run without leaking for at least on the order of months. I had shells on Linux kernels that will run on the order of years. You are apparently I'll equipped to manage an enterprise Unix solution.
We all know that linux isn't even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The 3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise" environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted, Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in their spare time while Microsft's [SIC] IIS has an actual professional full fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour [SIC] , we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the Linux boxes.
Ximian, KDE 2.X are pretty hard to beat. Too much functionality for the basal minded. I've seen a 32MB piece of crap Cobalt box with Linux 2.2.16X survive quite a large beating. You used the wrong compiler to build the 2.4.9 kernel anyway. You probably didn't link /usr/include to the linux source tree. There is ReiserFS in the kernel, there are several distributions including journalled filesystems in them, XFS is offered with RedHat 7.1 via SGI. JFS is able to be put in. Reiser is already there. SMP support has been there since 2.2. You are wrong. The memory is far more protected than it is in Windows anything. I have never seen apache crash, nor BIND for that matter. Funny, your amateur ass stages servers for Fortune 500 companies on production boxes and then has to re-install Windows? Never was there a day where a Unix server could not do more with less hardware than Windows. Ever. Even Apple chimed into that idea.
Needless to say, I won't be recommending [SIC] Linux/FSF to anymore of my clients. I'm dissappointed [SIC]that they won't be able to leverege [SIC]the free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the same freedoms as the GPL.
Needless to say you cant spell. You don recommend anything to anyone, your delusions of grandeur are most amusing. If you want to pay for support, you can. RH support is quite good, actually. Given that you recompiled the kernel on a system with the wrong compiler and then whine about it, you complain about Linux? Shared source is not completely open, retard, its chunks of code. And for the complete source you have to shell out big cash. Most appliances run non-Microsoft Code.
As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows 98/NT/2K are your only choices.
Linux is in academia because it is meritorious. Lotus Notes, Oracle, SAP are all ported to Linux, hardly "Hello World". It's a hobby to you, you clearly have to spend more time with it because you sir, are a complete and utter moron. Nick try on a troll.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.