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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.
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
No. Long time customers of Plextor will continue buying Plextor equipment, since it is generally the best, and those long-time customers value quality above all else. When you see stuff like "my next drive will be a BenQ, not a plextor!" you are not dealing with a statement representative of the loyal Plextor buyer. BenQ, ffs...
As always, the correct approach is for everyone worried about this to send polite emails to Plextor corporate.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
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
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
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
I dunno about you but pretty much every piece of hardware from CD drive to network card, etc.. has had some piece of windows software which I promptly tossed in the garbage. I didn't buy the drivers [cuz I run hardware that I know works in Linux] I bought the hardware.
If the hardware didn't work out of the box with the Linux kernel the hardware has ZERO value to ME period. So if they want to push the hardware they have to provide the drivers [or specs or both].
The drivers have zero commercial value since they can only be used with that hardware. It isn't as if someone can copy it and use it for their software [unless they mimic the interface].
Again, the hobby groups of the 70s/80s/90s haven't disappeared. You don't even need to spend time on writing drivers if you just give people the specs.
Here's how you do it.
1. Make 4 cards [of whatever].
2. Email the lkml and offer them to people willing to write drivers.
3. Send them the card and the specs and tell them they can keep the card if they write a working driver under the GPL.
4. Take the driver and bundle it with said hardware [or get it merged into the kernel].
5. Profit!
All this costs you is 4 copies of your product [for a 50$ network card this is a mere 200$], postage and a copies of the interface specification.
If the hardware is worth anything the developers have incentive since they get cool hardware for essentially free. So they have incentive to participate...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
Please, it wasn't Mandrake's fault for using some code SuSE had commissioned, but then rejected before the distribution CDs were burned. It wasn't even SuSE's fault for writing the code that Mandrake used. It was LG's fault for not adhering to the ATAPI specification. And they were read-only CD-ROM drives, not CD-RW drives.
The ATAPI specification says what the command should be to force a writeable device to decache. The code in question worked by issuing a "flush write cache" command, and checking the error response. A writer should say "Cache empty" or maybe "Decached successfully". A read-only drive should say "Command not implemented". This is how one can tell a writer from a reader without requiring long -- and soon outdated -- tables of make and model IDs.
The LG read-only drives which were temporarily damaged by the Mandrake {and, for that matter, pre-release downloaded SuSE} software were designed so that the operation code for the "flush cache" command was used to signal a "start firmware upgrade" operation. This is in direct violation of the ATAPI specification, which prescribes what each operation code should represent so as software developed using any one ATAPI drive can be expected to work with any other ATAPI drive. The result was that the software in question quite reasonably asked the drive to decache; but the drive had of course by this time entered flash upgrade mode, and mis-interpreted the next command -- a "last error report" request -- as the beginning of the new firmware. LG should have been hauled over the coals for selling faulty goods. Instead, Microsoft and their apologists crowed with glee that a piece of open source software, which was doing something quite reasonable, apparently damaged some badly-designed and badly-documented hardware which reacted in a quite unreasonable way.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
This, ladies and gentlemen is why I own a LG superdrive.
...HARDWARE... manufacturers realize that ... the better.
I put it in my AMD64 Gentoo based box, booted up and it "just worked". No drivers, no special CD burning software [outside of cdrecord and growisofs], etc...
There is no value for me in commercial CDR tools since free [and decently working ones] exist already. The sooner
You don't need special software to use a Plextor drive as an ordinary burner. That works fine with cdrecord using your favorite Unix-Flavor or Nero etc. using Windows.
The special thing about Plextor drives is that they give you the ability to check the quality of a burned media and therefore you would need either the Plextools (windows only), PxScan/PxView (windows with some bulk drives) or PxLinux (linux and probably other unix-flavors, since there are no Plextools for them).