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Interview with Alexander Noe, PxScan Developer
wikinerd writes "I interviewed Alexander Noe, developer of the open source PxScan and PxView utilities. He recently received a cease-and-desist letter by Shinano Kenshi, the Japanese company which controls Plextor. His utilities provide similar functionality with PlexTools, sending special command sequences to Plextor DVD recorders that activate special features such as media quality check."
Why do they keep trying to hide this stuff from us?
The same goes for the Canon Digital Rebel, and everything else that has an artificial ceiling put on performance.
Just another example of an established company trying to push around the hard-working small-time developer. What else is new.
It was already slow for me:
0 5jun
The interview was completed through IRC chat. The whole text is released under a "verbatim copying" licence, so we encourage you to re-publish it if you wish (see the full licence at the end).
Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Hello, please introduce yourself and briefly describe the utilities you developed.
Alexander Noé: I'm Alexander Noé:, currently studying computer science at TU-Chemnitz. The utilities PxScan/PxView i've developed perform error scans on Plextor PX-712/716 and Plextor Premium drives. The tests are the same, but PlexTools had some handling I didn't like, for example you can run several tests on DVDs, but in PlexTools you couldn't trigger them at once, but rather had to trigger one test at one time. My goal was just to make all that more convenient.
Nikolaos S. Karastathis: You received a letter via email about these utilities. Who sent the letter and what did it say?
Alexander Noé: The letter was sent by lawyers working for Shinano Kenshi. The Lawyers claim those utilities would violate their clients rights.
Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Have you replied to this letter?
Alexander Noé: No, I haven't.
Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Why do you think the lawyers sent this letter, and what are their requests?
Alexander Noé: Plextor maybe sees me as competitor. However, they don't offer any Linux version, neither free nor for money, so I have absolutely no idea what their problem with pxlinux could possibly be. They demand that I cease-and-desist from any further infringements, and demand that I comply a list of all steps I've taken to ensure that their clients' rights will no longer be infringed.
Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Have you contacted a professional lawyer yet? Did you receive any legal advice?
Alexander Noé: A professional lawyer said that in his opinion, none of the accusations made by Shinano are justified.
Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Is the letter confidential, can you post it for everyone to see?
Alexander Noé: The letter itself is not explicitely marked as such, but I'm not sure if I have the right to publish an email sent to me in general without the sender agreeing on this.
Nikolaos S. Karastathis: In the last years there are increasingly more legal problems for free/libre/open-source software projects. Now software patents may be introduced in Europe. What are your views on this issue?
Alexander Noé: I *really* hope that software patents will not be introduced, but I can't do much about it... as I don't really understand lawyer and politician language, like most people, I can hardly assess the consequences software patents would cause, but it wouldn't make life of free developers easier.
Have your say! Discuss in Wikinerds Forum (unregistered users are welcome).
Nikolaos S. Karastathis: What do you plan to do now?
Alexander Noé: I'm waiting what will happen....
Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Anything more you want to say?
Alexander Noé: Considering that Plextor did, not long ago, announce that they would be supporting open-source, I really wonder what all this is supposed to be about. Either they support open-source, or at least "tolerate" it, or they don't.
Nikolaos S. Karastathis: The interview appears to be finished. Thank you very much!
The text of this article is Copyright (C) 2005 by Alexander Noé and Nikolaos S. Karastathis. Verbatim copying and redistribution of the entire text of this article are permitted provided this notice is preserved and a reference to its original location is provided: http://portal.wikinerds.org/interview-alex-noe-20
Seems like Plextor forced the server hosting the interview off the web!!!
No wait...
Specially since you buy the DRIVE not the software. The software is the COST of doing business. The problem is you have ignorant marketting and investors who think "everything has commercial value".
.doc file and give it out.
Look at Broadcom. They hold their hardware specs a closely guarded secret [for the most part] and the net affect is you can only use their wifi stuff [reliably] in windows... The problem is without the drivers the hardware has zero customer value. But giving out free drivers lets you SELL hardware since it now has value.
The sad thing it isn't even that you have to write the damn drivers. In the OSS world of BSD/Linux the kernel contributors would GLADLY write a driver for free if it meant they could use some quality hardware with the respective OS. So all it costs the hardware manufacturer is describing the interface [at the high level] of how to talk to the hardware. Since these documents are ROUTINELY produced internally so the software teams can write their windows drivers all it means is you re-brand the
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The original source of this story is this thread on the CD Freaks Plextor DVD Burner Forum. I guess the comments in that thread tell a lot about what long time customers of Plextor think at the moment.
Seriously, serious legal threats usually don't arrive via email. Lawyers usually prefer to speak with certified letters and such, where they know it was received and who received it and when (and can prove it in court), and so in general anything received via email should be taken with a big grain of salt. Email is too unreliable (my spam filter ate it!) and just hasn't been around enough decades to make the legal system trust it. At most, they might send a certified letter and an email at the same time (and so the email will arrive first) but I suspect that even that's rare.
The email may be legitimate, and in this case it sounds like it probably is, but even so ... big grain of salt.
I wonder if you could play Doom 3 on it.
- Just because we CAN do a thing, does not mean we SHOULD do that thing.
Plextor may be doing a couple things. First and foremost, they're making sure no unauthorized Open Source projects spring up. They have no interest in supporting the software unless they wrote it. I can understand this motivation. We all remember the Mandrake Linux release that killed some CD RW drives, and Plextor is no doubt concerned about a similar problem for them.
Next, they probably have some lawyers trolling the net, sending cease and desists to anyone writing "competing" software. This is a sadly common CYA issue, and is done more to demonstrate they've been actively protecting their patents and copyrights than anything else. If this is the case, a few e-mails between the developer and Plextor could resolve the problem and allow the software to continue being developed, assuming Plextor doesn't want the product squashed.
Then again, this could all be about unauthorized use of the Plextor name or graphics on the developer's web site. They could be doing this to protect their corporate branding, and to keep people from thinking the software is authorized or supported by Plextor.
Has anyone contacted Plextor about this?
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
From http://www.plextor-europe.com/all/contactus.asp
Plesae be polite. Explain why you are boycotting their products, and why this is bad PR.
PLEXTOR EUROPE
Plextor Europe is located at:
Excelsiorlaan 9 B-1930 Zaventem, Belgium
Phone: +32-2-725-55-22
FAX: +32-2-725-94-95
PLEXTOR JAPAN
Plextor Japan is located at:
Kyodo Building (Tokyo Ekimae), 8th Floor
4-21 Yaesu 1 chome, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 103, Japan
Phone: +81-3-3517-8061
FAX: +81-3-3517-8065
PLEXTOR USA
Plextor USA is located at:
48383 Fremont Blvd. Suite 120 Fremont, CA 94538-6509, USA
Phone: +1-510-440-2000
FAX: +1-510-651-9755
General Info: info@plextor.com
Tech Support: support@plextor.com
It's nuts, isn't it? Especially with something as utterly generic (and probably free of "valuable" IP) as a sodding wireless card where I can pick up one just as good for $20 on eBay. I mean, I can understand high-end graphics cards manufacturers not giving out their specs as there probably is some very interesting stuff in there that has taken them a long while to develop, but a wireless card or a WinModem? Stupid, self-defeating and petty. Thank God for enlightened manufacturers like ralink - as a Linux user, I'm practically falling over myself to buy one of their nifty USB wireless-g pens :)
This is all very fuzzy. What exactly is he infringing upon? Cant be their trademarks, cant be copyright.. could be patents, but he is just writing software which is not covered by patent law in europe. (I think he is German?)
I very much doubt he is doing anything illegal.
The problem is, they DO charge extra for the software, so any competition is a threat to their revenue stream.
If someone writes free software to do something they charge $50 for, and it gets ported to Windows, then it can cost them money. Having a lawyer threaten a small time developer is far less expensive than losing a portion of their revenue stream, if all goes well for them.
There's also the fact that if this software exists for Linux, then there will be no ROI on porting their high cost tools to Linux. An entire market segment would be lost to them.
This is all about the BHBs protecting an existing revenue stream (The Windows software they sell) and a prospective revenue stream (A Linux version if they ever decide they want one).
I know, I know, selling hardware to Linux uses is a good thing, because it's sales you wouldn't get otherwise, but I don't think the PHBs see it that way. A Linux user is someone who will NEVER buy their additional software packages. They're a sale that can't be milked for extra sales, and therefore is a less desirable sale.
Truth be told, they'd probably prefer the Linux community ignore them unless they toss "Linux" into their marketing copy.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Plextor may be doing a couple things. First and foremost, they're making sure no unauthorized Open Source projects spring up. They have no interest in supporting the software unless they wrote it. I can understand this motivation. We all remember the Mandrake Linux release that killed some CD RW drives, and Plextor is no doubt concerned about a similar problem for them.
Plextor would have nothing to fear if they've followed the ATAPI / MMC specifications correctly. Those drives that died (I had one) implemented something like a firmware flash (or "trash") command using the same opcode as the write cache flush command (or something similar, the details in my head are fading). On a CD-ROM drive, write cache flush obviously is unnecessary, however, that doesn't mean that the opcode can be grabbed to be used for something else. The CD-ROM manufacturer was the root cause of this problem.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Even if they explicitly tell him not to do so, he can still make public the information in the letter.
They have copyright on the letter. What he needs to do is paraphrase the letter, with attribution, and quote only the most unbelievably stupid parts.
As for the original program, they need to tell him which specificy rights of theirs he is violating. The is no such thing as generic "intellectual property". There are only copyright, patent, trade secret, trademark, and contractual rights.
Unless they have a patent on the method his program uses to perform the activity his program performs, or he's violating an NDA or using their trademark, they can't stop him from performing the activity.
Bottom line: they can't stop him from publishing his code, only theirs. Using the same methods they use doesn't violate their copyright.
sigs, as if you care.
The problem I have with GPU manufacters like ATI and nvidia is ...
... It's not like they're really that different technologies...
Don't you think they both understand what a pixel pipeline is? Or what a vertex shader is? Or
Also since when does interface dictate implementation? I mean look at AMD and Intel. Both implement x86 processors, both give out cycle timings, opcode formats, etc... I don't see cheap AMD clones on the market today...
I don't know how a GPU interface works exactly but chances are it has some uniform data format for various things like vertex lists, textures, vertex programs, etc. None of which explains how the GPU pipeline was implemented in silicon...
Again it's just more "our drivers are worth $$$"....
Imagine how crippled the x86 world would be if you had to use Intels compiler and were never told what the opcodes are or how they worked... We would have an exponentially smaller scale computer world I'd say. Specially since the hobby driven folk of the 80s and 90s are what really made the explosion possible.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Here's how I see it:
Companies put a lot of thought into their hardware implementations, the results of which would have to be shared after 20 years if they were to patent it. Instead, they choose to keep the details as trade secrets so they can attempt to hold onto them indefinitely, and require their competitors to reinvent the wheel.
The irony of it is, they'll never know if their competitors duplicated their research, so they'll never know where they have an advantage over their competitors, and where they don't.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Now wrap that third paragraph in a business process patent application and send it off to an IP attorney to be filed. In a year or two when you'll be awarded the patent (safe bet, given the USPO's track record), you can make a bundle from the VC's alone on the premise that you have the newest lighting-in-a-bottle-for-business-improvment(tm).
The number of hardware manufacturer's who currently Don't Get It would provide you with a potential customer base to whom to market that would last the rest of your life.
DVD Decrypter is dead, as well, thanks to a C&D from some company as yet unnamed.
Story @ CDFreaks
These are sad times...
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
If I was in their shoes I might have done the same thing. There are two reasons: 1) the features being exposed may not be fully tested and therefore are not supposed to be used by customers, 2) I don't want to have to pay for supporting stuff that's not supposed to be public in the first place. If people call support because they used these features, then I'm picking up the tab even though I might just say, "That's not supporter, Sir." But this could still impact the quality reputation of my product.
Obviously item 2 is a follow up to 1. In any event, people tend to disregard the support costs of things but a company cannot afford to do that. Imagine the pain of dealing with customers who use the newly exposed "media quality" feature where it reports to them that the media is "good" but then when they go to burn the disk, it fails. Can you say support phone calls?
I agree that companies are, 99% of the time, acting as greedy fuckheads, but I have to cut them some slack on this one.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
You could just not document things that are not 100%?
Or am I missing something?
I mean I understand that products are usually evolutionary [e.g. the current model may have the beginnings of stuff that isn't ready yet but will be in the "next model"] but just don't document them.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
So far we have the following on the boycott list:
1. SCO
2. Microsoft XP Professional Edition(Home is ok *wink*)
3. Java (read "The Java Trap")
4. French Products (no real valid reason)
5. Plextor (see above article)
Unfortunately the lawyers did not tell what actually should be illegal.
I think the letter is just FUD from Plextor. If he copied some code from the plextor software the lawyers should have given the information of what he did
Because it could be argued that email is not a 100% guaranteed transmission. You could have ignored it and claimed your spam filter must have erased it, and gone on about your business.
IANAL, but don't you have to serve someone papers in a traceable way, like a registered letter or some such? And if so, I think these guys are probably not the brightest lawyers around. So I wouldn't worry.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
You kind of answered your own question. The hardware is dirt cheap. Heck those $20 cards are probably made in the same plant. These companies are trying to get the profits from the old days when you had only a few choices. And they are trying to get said profits through software without adding value.
They just can't let go of the past.
As mentioned in this /. article, Plextor PVRs Now Support Linux
Plextor Press Release, March 8, 2005
Plextor PVRs Now Support Linux
"...Plextor is strongly committed to supporting the Open Source Software movement with free development tools that help speed the creation of next-generation Linux-based video software," said Dirk Peters, director of marketing, Plextor. "The release of this SDK was a direct response to requests from the user community for an easier way to work with Plextor ConvertX video capture devices on computers running Linux..."
"Plextor's new Linux SDK provides developers with a free GPL-based full-source driver to support all of the popular V4L2 applications," said, Tom Luax, vice president of sales, WISchip International. "The combination of low-cost MPEG4/DivX Video compression hardware and Linux OSS software is a great solution for anyone who wants to build a high-quality and low-cost personal video recorder for their PC..."
Yes, I realize this is for PVR stuff, not DVD burners, but one would think their strategy would be a bit broader than product-by-product. Maybe they think their PVR offerings need more help, while their DVD burners don't.
I've already made a subdirectory under ~/suppressed.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
The problem with 3D-cards is, that they are accelerators. That is, they don't implement entire 3d stack in silicon. They implement 3d stack in software and use silicon to accelerate it (think winprinter and winmodem).
Now what ATI and Nvidia consider valuable is which parts are in silicon and which in software. Obviously, they want as much as possible in software (saves silicon, marginal cost = 0). It took a lot of effort to figure this, by profiling most common applications.
Yes, but marketers always like to pretend that their products are perfect... we wouldn't make anything else sir...
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
The "worth" of the card in that case factors into several camps...
...] interface. You'd have to spend time and energy changing it to work with a different piece of hardware...
1. Is it efficient, can I get high FPS without killing the CPU?
2. Does it look good? Is there quality?
3. Does it work reliably? Can I use this card to develop on and trust that my customer sees the same thing?
#1 depends on the hardware
#2 and #3 depend moreso on the software.
Even still it's a 3D graphics library that works only with the nVidia [or ATI or
That said..
What's stopping giving out the INTERFACE and not the software side of things? You still have to BUY the card. Software alone can't emulate that.
Think of the value proposition in terms of things you can't easily provide yourself. What does nvidia do that makes me want to give them money?
It certainly isn't writing drivers because we have competent people at xorg-x11 to do that. What they do that others [in the OSS world] cannot do is produce a GPU capable of pushing polygons.
In otherwords I don't want to pay nvidia to write drivers. I want to pay them to design efficient hardware that makes the nippomatics in ut2k4 even more realistic.
BTW, do you pay Intel to write an OS for you to use with your Intel processor? Did you pay sony money to produce music to listen with your sony CD player? Did you pay Maytag to make the dishes you wash with your dishwasher and did you pay Ford for the roads you want to drive your ford truck on?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Telephone: Brrring! Brrrring!
Nikolaos: Hello? Yes? Yes, General. No, I never--... I didn't think that--... No, I'm not a terrorist! I just--... Guantanamo?! But I--... yes. Yes, I see. No problem. Yessir.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
Your argument goes astray a bit because it only focuses on the producer and consumer without looking at the competition.
The existence of an open source application that jiggers the proprietary doohickeys on my device is potentially an useful aid to my competition. It may help them figure out may trade secrets, or to divine strategies equivalent to or better than the ones I use for my patented technologies.
It's not much help to my competitors; in practical terms it is indistinguishable from zero help. On the other hand the cost of sending a chest thumping C&D on official stationary to some private individual is practically indistinguishable from zero too.
So when in doubt, turn the crank on the lawyer box and spit out another C&D. It's cheap and risk free, and keeps your legal staff in practice for when you really need them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
if it meant they could use some quality hardware with the respective OS
Perhaps its not high quality hardware. By staying secretive, they can try to prevent people from finding this out.
Maybe you are being too generous by giving them the benefit of the doubt. I seem to recall that one of the signs of mature, high quality software is that it is available for multiple platforms. Porting code can reveal bugs that are hard to find. Maybe if the hardware design is sketchy and barely functional, they are scared to attempt to get it to work on another platform lest they be found out. Or, perhaps like many "modem" manufactures, they put some of the expected hardware functionality in the software.
The simple reaction should be, if they don't support my efforts, I will not support them.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
This premise is proven false time and time again.
... well ... um you got issues.
... to me the extra 200$ is worth it since I plan to own the processor for several years the average cost compared to the time savings is huge...
Look at the x86 CPU [or even ARM]. Look at GPUs, etc..
There isn't a lot of competition in high end products because just knowing how to "jigger the doohickey" isn't enough to figure out how the doohickey works.
If your trying to sell something like a 16550 UART in 2005 as a standalone IC
Complex enough products [to which the value is greater because the ability to solve it on ones own is lower] are hard to mimic to a level of similarly demanded by the customer.
Look at Transmeta and VIA. They're both x86 processors [well sorta] that did little to dent the x86 world [of which AMD which produce awesome cpus is even a small part of].
It's not enough that you're functionality equivalent you have to be just as efficient and cost effective.
I mean, I could buy that 100$ slow as shit Transmeta processor or I could buy that 200$ very fast and power efficient AMD64 processor
So no, I don't think companies revealing the interface reveal their meaningful valuable secrets. It's just a matter of controlling how and when and where the user uses the device.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
It may be a little hard to claim the spam filter ate it when your interview about it is posted all over the internet.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
This premise is proven false time and time again. ...
It's not enough that you're functionality equivalent you have to be just as efficient and cost effective.
You're talking about much more elaborate, strategic kinds of situations. I'm talking more about the corporate instinct to swat a mosquito it detects crawling on it's hide. The chances are the mosquito isn't going to do it any harm, but it's easy to just brush it off.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
...said Dirk Peters, director of marketing, Plextor.
I dunno, that sounds like a made-up name to me.
The problem is brushing the proverbial mosquito off your arm also knocks off um ... fuck these metaphors...
You piss off customers by making flaky non-portable drivers. ATI for instance doesn't really share the user base in Linux as nvidia does and it's solely because their drivers suck.
But think about it this way, if the company thinks their TOP OF THE LINE product can be easily replicated today using part-time volunteers spread out across the globe... of how much value is their product anyways?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
They aren't documented. He's activating features that are hidden "using special codes" that are sent to the device.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
Seriously,
the best way to speak is with your wallets and ur voice. If eveyone on slashDot sends plextor an e-mail saying that what they are doing is complete BS, and we won't stand for this stuff, we will boycott their stuff and recommend others against purchasing their products they will start to listen.
If every posted article posted gets slashDotted within 5 - 10 mins of it getting posted, u can imagine the number of e-mails that can get sent telling them what u think.
It just takes about 2 mins to write a decent e-mail, do it now and speak up for the little guy.
DDB
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
So why would they provide support for that? It's clearly not a documented use of the product. So they're not obligated to support users doing it.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The site has been completely redone with XHTML 1.1 and CSS2. The result is the site loads quicker, has cleaner code, and is vastly easier to maintain. I would like to give much thanks to Ryan for helping me out with this.
Yeah, but it's fucking unreadable. Black text on dark brown background that gets even darker when hovered? WTF was the moron who did this thinking? Dipshits.
Isn't there some watchdog group for open source software that can file lawsuits against companies like this?
Either way, no more Plextor products for us.
The implementation of hardware doesn't have to have anything to do with the overall architecture it's attached to. As long as the device sits on a layer that sufficiently distances it from the nuts and bolts of the machine it's part of, there's no reason that, given the same layer in a different machine, that device can't be portable.
As an example, consider PCI devices. As long as the device doesn't have its own BIOS (Namely, video cards), there's no reason you couldn't put the same device in a Mac and in a PC. USB devices are even easier, as there's rarely code on the device that gets run by the host.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
But they get the callers anyway! And they have to tell the callers "no we don't support that," which makes their company look really bad even though it's no fault of their own.
Microsoft has that problem in spades. Something like 80-90% of the support calls they get about Windows have nothing to do with Windows, but only about third-party software that's installed. What can Microsoft do other than point people towards the right company to handle it? Nothing. But it makes them look bad and lowers their reputation.
Comment of the year
According to the cdfreaks website, the PxLinux software simply uses a series of SCSI commands to retrieve statistical data from the drive. The same principle would also apply to ATAPI.
The SCSI command set is a set of published specifications specifically intended for such purposes. It cannot reasonably be the case that Plextor, the drive manufacturer, by following these specifications, expected to restrict the use of SCSI commands for drive control.
It's possible that there is some sort of exclusive software development agreement between Plextor and Shinano Kenshi, but that agreement is not binding on other parties.
It would also be possible, in principle, to sell these drives under condition not to use them except as strictly specified, but again such an agreement would not be binding on other parties.
In no case is it reasonable to seek damages against some third party who independently develops a means to use a manufactured device as intended. An impossible situation would clearly develop for both industry and the public at large if courts were to award such damages.
[I am not a lawyer, and the foregoing does not constitute legal advice.]
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
Not really, just tell your customer "you're not using it right, read the damn manual" and be done with.
... well too bad really. And in terms of "word of mouth" damage it's low.
What really makes companies that provide hardware look bad is when you use THEIR drivers and the device is still flaky and unreliable.
What hurts Microsoft is the low quality of the software they write [well depends, some tools are decent but as a whole they're pretty bad]. I've never called their techsupport, I have called their activation drone before though...
If a customer calls and says "I tried to l33t mod the device and it borked" and then gets upset when the dude on the other and says "STBU"
If any of my friends tried to "home brew upgrade" their motherboards or processors or something and it blew up I'd just laugh [at them] and lend them money for a new box in the meantime.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
learn to spell and actually type out your words.
I doubt that they will take emails seriously that contain:
"d00d u 5ux0r5."
Great. Now I can't get Twisted Sister out of my head.
I've heard the excuse that the radio frequency is controlled by software, so open source drivers could be modified to make the chip transmit on unlicensed frequencies. Seems like a weak excuse to me.
It's not risk free however. How many people are going to not buy from them now and how many others are now going to badmouth them when their name comes up? More of the latter than the former I'm sure, but together they definitely make the 'cost' of that letter a hell of a lot higher than just the cost of the lawyer.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
Much as slashdot hates patents, the purpose is to protect you from someone stealing your hard work. If knowing your interface would help me design a device that competes with you, (though there are good arguments that it wouldn't, lets accept that as a fact for this post) then you should patent the device to protect yourself. Patents are public disclosure, and give you all the protection you need. If it would help me compete with you, then you have nothing to gain by hiding your interfaces, so publish them.
In short, not publishing your interface is not a valid way to protect them.
Anecdote:
I recall having a chat with a Plextor rep about just these features of their brand new drive a year or so ago at CeBIT. The guy was explaining all the wonderful new functionality: clever overburning/compression and whatnot, and an encryption thingummy. I asked him how much of it would be supported under Linux, and he said "only basic CD-writer functionality". So I asked him if he didn't imagine that any of the extra features would be reverse engineered or whatever, and he explained with a big grin that that'd be impossible. He actually sounded pretty proud about it - some of the functionality, he said, was entirely impossible to reverse engineer (the encryption stuff). And Plextor certainly had no intention of helping anybody out on the job.
It occurred to me to wonder why Plextor are so sure that this is a good thing. Then it occurred to me that by buying the new Plextor drive, I'd be paying for a whole lot of supposed R&D on unusable features.
My next drive wasn't a Plextor.
Another developer who also received a cease-and-desist letter from the same company is Zeb, who developed PxLinux (a port of PxScan/PxView). I interviewed him just now. Read the interview with Zeb
I use and prefer Lite-On drives. They are cheap and standards-compliant. The same can't be said for Plextor (although they have improved in recent years).
What really put me over the fence for Lite-On is the freeware (closed source) program KProbe. This works only with Lite-On drives, and is only for Windows (unfortunately). Even though it is closed source, it is a free download (unlike Plextor's commercial utility).
The program KProbe seems to perform similar functions to what these Plextor utilities do: show the true low-level bit error rates of the disc, and allow certain drive settings to be overridden as desired (minimum and maximum speeds, DVD+R booktype, DVD region, and so on).
With the ability for end users to get at this information, it becomes possible to make informed decisions when buying blank DVD media.
If only these low-level functions were standardized, *sigh* -- it would be great if mainstream DVD and CD-burning software could use them to check disc reliability, and the OS could even inform the user if a disc were about to fail.
With more and more people storing home movies and other keepsakes on DVD these days, this will become more important. The ability to see this low-level info has saved me from losing data several times due to cheap media: beware "Great Quality" from Fry's!
Now, if only KProbe were open source....
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
My Journal, here
Take a look
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[ 1151117 ] Administrative issue
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Submitted By:
Takeshima - takeshima Date Submitted:
2005-02-24 07:40
Changed to Closed status by:
hemosSourceForge.net SubscriberSourceForge.net Site Admin Closed as of:
2005-03-03 07:00
Last Updated By:
nobody - Comment added Date Last Updated:
2005-06-06 10:45
Number of Comments:
6 Number of Attachments:
0
Category: (?)
Project Administration Group: (?)
Second Level Support
Assigned To: (?)
Jeffrey Bates Priority: (?)
8
Status: (?)
Closed
Summary: (?)
Administrative issue
One of your members is starting a new project, called
PXscan, PXview or PXTool Linux.
This contains unauthorised usage of Plextor-owned
intellectual property and should be refused.
If accepted, we will take legal steps.
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Hmm.. "Mr. Your rights online" Hemos is a wonderful censor and deleter of content, isnt he?
I guess depleting a 'business venture' of some big company is more worth saving than a free software developer. Well, either that, or MMC3 scsi commands are now considered "propertiary secrets".
Which is it Hemos?
Hear, hear. I too, have recently purchased TWO LG Multi-format Superdrives, (an GSR 4162B and a 4163B). Now here's an interesting story. On my dual boot machine, the WINDOWS INSTALL was a royal pain! "Must install IE 5.5, must reboot, must reboot for DMA to take effect, etc." An hour and a half later, I could finally use SOME of the software under windows. Reboot to linux. Drive just works! No software to install, etc. K3B worked like a charm and was burning DVDs in minutes. Hats off to LG. And the next time someone complains about installing linux software vs. windows software installs, ask them to try the above on a dual boot machine and compare...
...support.
Its an awesome feature I'm dying to use...
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
still available, can anonymous developement continue? Stop putting your name on this stuff and let them find somebody to sue.
What?