Mount Rainier for Linux

Cpyder writes: "Seems like Philips is getting the "patents are bad"-picture, as they have decided to let Linux support the Mount Rainier next-generation file device system. Seems like the end of floppies+zips+cdrw+whatever is finally in sight. Check it out at The Reg."

Comments

IBM

[Beautyon]

This probably has more to do with IBMs incredible support for Linux and the momemntum that Linux is gathering than any enlightenment on the part of Phillips. Phillips, for example, did a crackdown on all CD pressing plants to make sure that all artwork on CDS carried the "Compact Disc Audio" logo. After this, it was impossible to press CDs at DFI in France, for example, without the CD logo. Thats more like the behaviour of the Phillips that we know.

Re:IBM

[Montag2k]

What about the fact that Philips (jointly with other companies) developed the CD-audio standard that we all know and love - for the entire industry instead of just for themselves. They have a pretty good track record of not being patent whores.

BTW, everyone keeps spelling it 'Phillips'. There is only one 'L'.

This might have very bad effects.

[Krapangor]

Due to the opening up these standards, it's very easy for competitors to create compatible devices without license fees. So the initial inventors don't get very much money from their inventions like they could make initially. This is very bad because it will force other companies do the very same. You might say: good for open source community. But in fact it's very bad: it restricts the profit inventors get from their invention. Look for example at IBM, they nearly died from getting not enough money from their invention of the IBM PC. So nobody will do any more inventions, because they look at IBM and say: "Look, they nearly died from getting not enough money from their invention. Let's rather sell old, cheap stuff and get rich !" So, no more inventions will be done and there will be no enconomical and scientific advancement. So, you see that treaties like this are in fact very bad and might destroy our economy.

Re:This might have very bad effects.

[Anonymous Coward]

what?
They will make their money. Opening up their standards will make them more money over time. Lets say they went the DVD route, the Linux community would just reverse enginner the specs and the law suits would flow like rain. Bad press for them and low adoption rates of Mt rainier.Make the software specs open then the licensing fees will get payed by the companys that make the hardware/disks, they then pass that cost onto the consumer. The consumer will be willing to pay for the drives and disks if they know that everybody can use the media. So development costs will be spread out over time into the cost of the drives and media.
Thus by opening up their specs everybody wins, being open makes the format popular which leads to a large user base, which leads to increased sales of the drives and media. This whole senario only works if the software specs are open to begin with.

Patents aren't bad!

[scriber]

Remember that it's not patents themselves that are bad. They allow you to ensure that you'll get a return on the huge amount of money you spend doing research on algorithms, processes, etc. Then, unlike copyright, they ensure that your invention is released into the public domain before several generations of people have come and gone.

Patents are only bad when abused. By abuse I mean obtaining overly broad patents purposely, forming companies whose sole purpose is to sue everyone that does anything remotely related to patents they purchased from others, or similar. It's perfectly fine to use a patent to charge people to use your legitimate invention, however.

Also remember that Free Software, no matter how obscure, can cut into your profits if people use it instead of your own software. Why should someone pay lots of money for your product that implements an amazing new encoding algorithm that you payed a million dollars to develop when they could use Free Software that does the same thing just because you were too nice to demand a licensing fee from "free" projects?

Don't worry, if the technology is that good, someone will find a way around it. Look at Ogg Vorbis, for example, which implements an intelligent audio codec without anyone else's IP.

Re:Patents aren't bad!

[Black Parrot]

> Why should someone pay lots of money for your product that implements an amazing new encoding algorithm that you payed a million dollars to develop when they could use Free Software that does the same thing

How many algorithms do you know of that someone spent a million dollars developing?

Most of the really important algorithms, just like mathematics, are coming out of public research institutions (aka "universities") and are published without patent encumbrance.

Unfortunately the PTO has succumbed to pressure from money interests and made lots of formerly unpatentable stuff patentable, opening up a gold rush.

No, not an innovation rush -- a gold rush.

Also, notice that (in the USA at least) patents are justified as a way to promote commerce. Commerce, like innovation, was absolutely booming in IT even without algorithm patents.

As Alan Cox said, patents are just a way for the big guys to keep the little guys out. The big guys all hold lots of patents, so they can pay each other off with funny money (or by swapping licenses for lawsuits), but the little guy has to pay real money if he wants to play.

The rich get richer by natural processes; patents are a government institution that serves primarily to speed the process up.

Just like with the DoJ's pact with Microsoft, the US government is more interested in floating the stock market than in supporting economic fair play, or even long-term economic well being.

Finally someone has some sense...

[HaloMan]

Someone has seen sense and realised the only way to have a mass-market storage device is to make it easy to develop for. Ever wondered why the Floppy/CD/CD-R/CD-RW/DVD-R/DVD-RW are each successful?

But I think its the only way that Phillips can hope to compete with DVD-R, DVD-RW or whatever ;)

Software Burning Difficult? (or, YA Mac reference)

[Zanthany]

The Mount Rainier standard sounds nifty, even if the technology is still a couple of years out of wide consumer usage. But my only beef is this: does current CD-R(W) burning software for any platform have to be more complicated than the average computer user can handle?

Enter Apple's little-known Disc Burner software, and the Authoring Support software located under the hood in the system folder. The basic premise? Put a blank CD in and Disc Burner asks for a format (either hybrid ISO/HFS, Audio, or just plain vanilla ISO), and voila, on your desktop, is an icon of your CD. Drag-n-Drop to your heart's content, and then select "Burn CD" from the Special menu (or drag the CD to the trash, then asking you to burn the CD. Even I never have understood the user interface issues with dragging a disk to the trash to eject it). Done. Simple. My cat can even burn CDs now.

The moral of the story? Mount Rainier will be an easily applied standard across all platforms. But who said the current technology's software had to be difficult? Granted, Disc Burner is not Mount Rainier, but it definitely is a current and usable facsimile of the technology.

Details on CD-MRW / Mt. Rainier

[martyb]

For more info on what Mt. Rainier (CD-MRW) is all about, check out their mt-rainier web site

Nature

[germinatoras]

I, for one, am really glad to see that Linux is supporting our national parks. Heaven knows that we geeks need to get outdoors once and a while.

Re:Confused

[WalterSobchak]

OK, Mount Rainier is a hardware command specification, not a file format. Mt. Rainier is geared towards the UDF file format, but other file formats could be used. The key point was, that Mt. Rainier would allow the OS to see a MR CD-RW as a block-addressable (rather than a packet-addressable) device. An OS can just write a file system onto a MR CD-RW on the dics without having to worry about packet sizes or bad-block mapping.

The big point here really is: This would have created a lucrative business for Mount Rainier licensees in selling preformatted MR media

So in any case, any OS could have operated on MT CD-RW (as far as I understood that), but it was the formatting that was blocked.

Hope that helps,

Alex

Reinventing the wheel?

[JoeShmoe]

This type of CD-R/RW usage has been available (in Windows) for years via third-party software like Adaptec/Roxio's DirectCD or the NTI's FileCD and so on. CD players already support packet writing! Why is Microsoft, IBM et. al. taking about reengineering the CD from at such a low level? Doesn't it just require someone to write a Linux version of DirectCD/FileCD? Why can't we just format CD-R/RW discs with the UDF file system that DVD's already use instead of inventing a brand new one?

Also, I'm not sure I even like the idea of this becoming the "default" behavior for CD writers. I strongly dislike the overhead involved in formatting. I find that a packet writing CD-R/RW hold about 100MB less. I'd rather have the full capacity. I mean, if you are using this thing for business backup (which seems to be the primary argument for needing Linux support) then you are only going to be burning once a day, so why not just burn a full 650/700MB worth of data as a single data track?

- JoeShmoe

US stock market bubble / patent office insanity

[maynard]

I can't agree with this more. While I agree with your general sentiment WRT the U.S. patent office policy, I find the statement "US government is more interested in floating the stock market than in supporting economic fair play" to be particularly insightful.

With average Dow P/E ratios hovering at 23 and, a flood of cheap money coming out of the Fed (just *look* at M3 since 9/11!), and the Treasury's recent decision to end the 30 year long bond in an effort to push down long term interest and mortgage rates, it's pretty clear that the policy is to squeeze out real estate equity inflationary (and illusory) gains through refinancing in order to float consumer spending and stock market speculation. The frightening thing about this is that it doesn't in the least promote healthy economic activity through increased productivity, it's entirely speculative -- as evidenced by the stock market continuing to rise even with ridiculous P/E ratios making stocks such an obvious bad long term bet. Which makes your analogy of the patent office creating a new "gold rush" all the more relevant: patenting obvious mathematical algorithms doesn't increase productivity as much as it creates exclusive monopolies for the big players. Sure, they get to claim the gains on their balance sheet, but it's a net loss for the economy as a whole.

I'm worried that the Fed won't be able to maintain and prop up the credit bubble as rising unemployment creates a certain rise in consumer bankruptcies. With increasing unemployment, huge consumer credit and mortgage debt (backed by unreasonably inflated property values) defaults, I fear an unraveling from the banking system through the stock market. Never mind all the crazy derivative hedging going on making many major banks and financial institutions leveraged beyond belief. I fear a recession like we haven't seen since 1929. It could get bad.

Of course, I could be wrong... (hope so -- I just bought a house! :) )

Cheers,
--Maynard

ps - like your .sig.

Sounds a lot like FTL...

[wowbagger]

This sounds a lot like the basic concepts behind Flash Translation Layer - you take a pile of sectors that are slow to erase, and insert a layer that allows you to map logical sectors to physical sectors any way you want. Thus, when you need to "erase" or "re-write" a logical sector, you just change the mapping to a physical sector that hasn't been written to. You then do a background process of taking physical sectors that are "dirty" (written to) but unused and erase them.

Funny how this idea comes around - FTL, LVM, and now Mt. Rainier. Similar concepts, different applications.