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Does Unisys Really Get It?
Joe Barr writes "There's an interesting story on NewsForge today about Unisys and its new-found love for Linux. In the story, Robin Miller interviews Unisys VP of engineering Anthony Gold and asks such delicate questions as how Unisys 'planned to make amends for its use of GIF patents against open source projects'? It's a good read, and in this day and age of software dinosaurs trying for peaceful co-existence with Linux, a very timely one."
"Quite some time ago"? It's been less than two months!
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
No.
That's it, really. Patents are out of the scope of the GPL. The only way they interact is that if you don't have the rights to disribute the source (e.g. by patent liscence), you can't distribute the the binary.
It's oft talked about that patent might be a method of getting an end run around the GPL, and maintining restrictions on GPL'd code.
IBM, who claims to be investing billions in Linux, but recommends Microsoft ® Windows ® XP Professional
All the desktop vendows have this boiler-plate phrase on their websites/advertising. When they put this in there - Microsoft gives them marketing dollers (read money).
So what if IBM recomends XP for it's Thinkpads. They certainly don't recomend it for their POWER5 servers or mainframes - the places where it counts.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Does UNISYS get what? Posing the question makes it seem as though somehow there's some religious pilgrimage to be made to offer show of support.
The reality is, if YET ANOTHER systems vendor is touting LINUX, it's only good for LINUX, it decreases the chances that big wig decision makers at company X may balk because of the old "lack of vendor support" argument... though these last couple of years that argument has certainly been fleeting.
Still the more pervasive LINUX is and the more companies support it, the greater the chances that LINUX will open doors than were previously closed.
This is not true. The GPL specifically addresses patents -- it if you cannot grant all the rights under the GPL (right to produce derivate works and the like) you cannot GPL your code.
That being said, it would still be a pain in the ass for the GPL-using world, since we'd have to go back and rewrite code, but there would be no liability for anyone other than the person trying to insert patent-infringing code.
May we never see th
If your backups are CPU bound, you've got a problem anyway. :)
And in Sun jargon, DR stands for Dynamic Reconfiguration. Which isn't related to partitioning to speak of. It's more like adding/removing hardware live. For example adding a NIC to a live server. Or removing a dead CPU board and replacing it without downtime.
...and found out you have to run Windows on the box as the primary operating system. I imagine that's why M$ isn't too ruffled by this. Linux can run on it on 4 or more of the processors, in groups. (I suspect "4 or more" requirement is due to the internal communications/synchronization buses.)
Apparently the box management is run from within the custom windows apps, so it won't be pure native Linux, at least not soon.
They say their market is datacenter server consolidation, specifically seeking situations where people want to move UNIX apps off old Solaris or HP-UX boxes onto a Linux box. Why anyone would do that by buying a box that comes with a built-in annuity to Redmond is a bit of a mystery. What's not a mystery is why Redmond wouldn't stand in the way of this effort. If it's successful (can't imagine it, personally) it would have the effect of putting compulsary Windows licenses into server rooms that might otherwise have switched to some more "pure" Linux install.
My wife (a Unisys employee) was pleased they were trying, but not impressed with the effort.
GIF was developed as an image format by Compuserve (I think). They used LZW compression, which was a Unisys patented compression algorithm, but they never notified, let alone licensed LZW. Unisys, being the mainframe shop it was, didn't even notice for a long time. When they did, they pressed the patent issue.
The important point is that they didn't press the LZW patent because of it's use in GIFs, per se. They pressed it because it was an important patent to them at the time for other compression purposes. Unisys was big in air-traffic control and a variety of other communications applications that used LZW for dynamic, real-time, streaming compression (which is about the only application it was still good for when you look at the other algorithms available, even then). If they didn't press it on LZW in GIFs, they could have lost the ability to press it in those other lines.
Remember that uncompressed GIFs did not infringe, they asked only for licensing on commercial use, and as the article states they did make not-for-profit licenses available. Questions like "What if a licensed program made the GIF, but I editted it with Gimp" made no sense to them. (Besides, Gimp didn't exist then either ;)
I was a Unisys systems programmer at the time, and I didn't know much about "open source", so I suspect Unisys management didn't have much of a clue either. I seriously doubt they had (or even now have) any idea how the community reacted to that issue. No one ever really grasped that it was Compuserve's fault for pushing a patent encumbered format (with the patent held by someone else) as a "standard". Unisys was caught by surprise and acted in the way most any company would at that time.
Times change. I learned about open source (and TCP/IP, and Unisys' brand new C compiler, and how a 36-bit word architecture complicates a C libarary implementation) by porting a subset of NCSA's httpd server to OS/2200, partially because the GIF issue introduced comp.sys.unisys to open source. (iirc, this was when Mosaic was the browser and the "graphical web" was barely graphical at all.) Some time later, Unisys demo'ed their ClearPath model for us and said "they were even working on a web server for it". I wasn't there, but a co-worker donned a medieval french helmet and said "I doubt if we're interested. We already have one, you see!"
So Unisys and I went different ways (although I did get a "wayback-machine call" for Unisys help last week). I moved on into UNIX, self-taught by downloading Slackware and trying to get it to do anything on Token Ring. Unisys moved on to buy Burroughs and into the "datacenter push" of Microsoft. One of us apparently learns quicker ;) Still, the 2200 was seriously unstoppable from both a hardware and a software standpoint, and even attemting to use MVS or anything else on the "newer" IBM 390 made me want to run screaming to the hills.
If Unisys has woken up, they have the potential to do incredible things with hardware and helping them release that hardware from the constraints of Windows is a huge opportunity for both Unisys and the Linux community. If the haven't woken up, then they will once the see what Linux can do on their hardware. I was on vacation when they demo'ed the ClearPath and heard I had already written a web server on their previous (non-Intel) hardware and the day I got back a Unisys SE was waiting in my cube to ask "how'ed you do that!". He was fascinated and ate up everything about open source I had to offer (sadly, not much at the time).
Bottom line: What does it hurt us to give them a chance? If they screw up, it's going to be their fault. We've already shown that we can help any company that really wants to play nice. If we snub them for what we see as a past slight to open source, when they probably didn't know what open source was, we present ourselves as being petty about something that we still, as a community, fail to acknowledge was a situation not of their own making.
Unisys had patents relating to the LZW compression algorithm, which were heavily used by gif. They essentially waited until gif became ubiquitous and then began charging people for use of their algorithms. Decompression was never restricted, but compression, and hence the creation of GIFs, essentially became illegal unless you were a huge corp like Adobe that could afford the licenses, which were not cheap.
.tar.Z, not .tar.gz.
Essentially, the people that suffered were the Free Software types, because we were giving away our stuff for free and suddenly couldn't do that anymore.
While we all refer to it as the GIF disaster, it's also the reason that the standard UNIX command, compress, isn't generally available on modern GNU/Linux distributions. Compress used LZW compression too; if you used UNIX at all in the late 80s, you'll remember a lot of software packages being passed around as
But compression was less of an issue because we already had gzip, and gzip was better, anyway -- I think people already prefered it and compress was already heading the way of the dodo. But gif was a bigger deal, obviously, because it was a graphics format. Back in the day, lots of porn was posted on USENET as GIF. Of course now we know that JPEG is better, compression wise, for photos, but it also requires much more CPU to decompress -- my old 386 decompressed JPG porn at an unbelievably slow rate, making wacking off extremely time consuming. Boy did I hate Unisys for that!