ARM has recently released source for some parts of the Linux drivers for current Mali GPUs under GPLv2, which might be the first step towards ARM SoC's with fully-open GPU drivers.
There are no guarantees, but at the moment it appears that ARM is much more receptive to the idea of open GPU drivers than Imagination Tech (PowerVR GPUs) or NVidea.
It'll be interesting to see where the hardware goes in the next couple of years. Can Intel (and AMD, if they get serious) pull marketshare from ARM, or will the RISC chip reign supreme?
I would expect this to be the standard 30-pin PDMI connector also found on the Dell Streak.
Hmm... so why don't they just come out and label it as such?
And if there's only one product out on the market using it, it's a little amusing to call it "a standard connector." I haven't heard anything about this connector -- is it going to be widely available, or is it just one more connector that needs a separate cable in my toolbox?
It looks like the PDMI connector is supposed to be electrically compatible with DisplayPort, USB, and analog audio. Why couldn't they just make a plug that looked like a combination of those plugs? That way consumers could either use the all-in-one combo-plug, or plug in individual, standard plugs that they probably already own!
I've talked with the guy briefly before on SFLC matters. He seems like a pretty level-headed guy and also runs the Pub Patent Foundation. I finally got around to RTFA, and here's what he said:
"It chills competition, it misleads the public and takes away from the credit patent holders deserve," says Daniel Ravicher, founder and executive director of New York nonprofit Public Patent Foundation, which has filed numerous suits.
Mr. Ravicher says he found one defendant, Johnson & Johnson's McNeil-PPC unit, by perusing his local drugstore shelves, where he found a bottle of Tylenol he says had an expired patent. Johnson & Johnson declined to comment.
I can totally understand the outrage if after the time of patent expiry someone in management at, say, Johnson & Johnson, added a patent number to a bottle mold or label, but what if they're just reusing an existing stock of bottles, labels, or molds?
To break down Ravicher's claims:
[leaving expired patent numbers on items] chills competition
I'm really not seeing it at all.
Let's just take the example of Tylenol. There's no way, no how that any company large enough to successfully manufacture FDA-approved generic acetaminophen would be inconvenienced by an out-of-date patent on a bottle of Tylenol. The patent information (unlike the totally disorganized registry of copyright renewals) is AFAIK all there online, for anyone to see, including whether or not the patent rights are still in effect.
Here are some times when it sounds reasonable fine or sue a company: - A patent is listed on a product, but the patent is not owned or licensed by the company (I believe that's straight-up infringement) - A patent is listed on a product, but it never was a real patent (I believe that's fraud) - A patent is listed on a product, but the patent doesn't apply to the product - A patent is first listed on a product After the patent has expired
[leaving expired patent numbers on items] misleads the public
In a very, very small way, yes, I guess it could.
But where's the harm caused by it? I'd argue that all of the crazy ads by drug companies do a lot more harm and cause a lot more confusion than out-of-date patent numbers on drug bottles.
Let's just think rationally here for a moment. In order for expired patent numbers on pill bottles to mislead the public, we'd have to have a person 1) read the patent number on the pill bottle. 2) try to use that patent number information in some manner in which the expiration date matters
Heck, how many people check to see if the pills themselves have expired?
Except for business purposes, I really don't see a "personal use" case in which the patent numbers have any relevancy to the end user. And in a business situation, a list of patents can be trivially checked.
[leaving expired patent numbers on items] takes away from the credit patent holders deserve
This seems like a "sloppiness" argument -- basically, if patent owners or licensors are too lazy to list patents on manufactured goods correctly, and remove them immediately upon their expiry, then they should pay a hefty fee.
I can, to a limited extent, agree with this point. But the problem here is that I've had to deal with another part of our nation's "limited monoploy" (i.e. IP) system, namely the minefield that is copyright and copyright extensions. If only all parts of this system were to operate with the same exacting, no-holds-bared, no-fine-withheld attitude that the Patent Office is taking here, then perhaps I'd be on board.
Maybe the point of this whole law is to get people to file fewer patents and to get them to less aggressively protect patented items with listed patent numbers on them. I seriously can't believe that's the case, but I'll accept it and move on. I don't have any patents myself, and I'm not planing
I'd say I was a hoopy frood, but (alas) I often don't know where my towel is!
went into a thrift store, found something he had no idea what it was then paid his money to purchase it and bring it home
The nice thing is that (1) I paid maybe 50 cents for the thing, and (2) all of the profit from the store goes to helping the needy in the community.
Generally speaking it works like this: I get to go and satisfy any find-new-stuff shopping cravings, I don't spend much, and the money goes to those in need. It's pretty much a win-win(-win ?) situation.
and try to figure out what it was..it's actually quite fun and I know many people who love discovering old stuff and figuring out what it is.
So if you want to protect your shit you just designed, the government encourages you to put a patent number on the device, often formed into the very metal or plastic comprising the casing or body of your thingamajig.
Then, at some time in the future, when the patent expires, you can't use that mold or casting tool anymore and have to build a new one, because otherwise it's false advertising?
Even if the mold says "This item is covered by patent #xxxxxxx," isn't it useful for further innovation that anyone can just type in that number and find the patent that describes the item?
For example: I just bought a weird kitchen tool at the thrift store the other day and was puzzled as to its precise use until I typed in the patent number on it and found out that it was an ice cube chunker (it works pretty well, too -- no, I'm sorry, I forget the patent # off the top of my head). Had it not had a patent number on it, I'd probably still be trying to squeeze citrus with it or something!
So here's the tradeoff as I see it: A) Keeping the numbers in place, with the big benefit to identifying items AND giving new innovators an easy starting point for further progress in the Useful Arts, versus B) Mandating removal so that a small handful of people who can't enter a number into Google or do basic subtraction can determine if a patent has expired.
Good job, congress, the law's really protecting us what good!
By G'Quan, he would make a very satisfying thump when he hits the ground, no?
And come to think of it, why is it that everyone seems so excited about doing something with Darl's detached head? Maybe SCO could auction the head off and make enough money to keep on going for a couple of years...
There is no talk of making any codec mandatory for HTML5 video. None.
Well, there were Ogg formats in the draft HTML5 spec. But then they were pulled out because Nokia and Apple got all tantrum-y about the whole thing. Really.
Having a default video codec would mean that people could just assume that there's Ogg Theora playback... or that there's Ogg Vorbis playback. Actually, as much contention as there was about Ogg Theora, I don't understand why people couldn't just compromise on getting Ogg Vorbis stuck in there. Even implemented in software, the iPhone and other handheld hardware could decode files very easily, and at least we'd finally be on our way towards sticking a fork in MP3.
HTML5 video specifically relies on the underlying browser (or OS) to provide decoding.
By definition, yes (unless you're relying on in-the-cloud decoding or magical pixies or something...), but I digress.
Just as you can put whatever kind of image you want in an img tag and rely on the browser to render it (if it can)...
Many browsers can't handle TIFF files, or BMP files, and last I checked IE had problems with PNGs and mostly barfed on SVG...
Most browsers (ie not Firefox) pass on video decoding to the operating system.
Many browsers may do so, but Firefox still has ~ 31% of the marketshare, about twice as much as Chrome, Safari, and Opera combined (source: wikipedia).
So what I'm saying is: Don't write off Fox... or the big red dinosaur (take your pick).
As most users have OS X or Windows, for which free, licensed h.264 decoders are readily available
That's free as in 'freeware', not Free as in Freedom.
or Linux with a GPU that has a hardware (also licensed) h.264 decoder
I actually don't know the numbers on this one and I'm curious about it. What percentage of hardware shipped today (desktops, servers, handhelds, etc...) has a fully-licensed (by the MPEG-LA) hardware decoder for H.264 in it?
And I'm no lawyer, but I wouldn't put it past the MPEG-LA to sue someone for using an H.264 software decoder, even if the hardware they were running it on had a fully-licensed hardware decoder in it.
most users don't have to worry about all this licensing malarkey.
I really wish that this were true, but I'm afraid that it's not the case. Just think for a second -- the H.264 hardware is only licensed for decoding not encoding. So if you want to upload a video from your DV-cam to your website or put it in your presentation, you'll need a license to go along with whatever software you use (or you'll need to pay a fee for software that includes such a license).
I'd root for Google's standard if it didn't suck balls so much and have practically no hardware support.
I'm no codec hacker, but I thought the whole point about all of this so-called "hardware" support was that it wasn't actually baked into silicon, but was low-level code that could be loaded onto DSPs. AFAIK google has 14 vendors working on hardware support, so it's just going to take a little time for that to make it to market.
And yes, it sounds like the VP8 codec needs ongoing help to get it whipped into shape. But given that people like a few FFMpeg developers have written much faster decoders than the reference one, it sounds like that work is well underway.
But that [PA-DSS...] is a legal requirement, not a licensing requirement.
Actually, according to the Wikipedia page (see the link in my comment below), it appears that PA-DSS is just an industry standard, not one bearing any requirements under current law.
The article does point out that the Legislature (Big "L") is/was considering putting into effect laws to regulate such systems, and it's highly likely that such legislation would build from current industry practices, but AFAIK there's actually nothing outside de-facto standardization at the moment.
Turning to H.264...
No one's forcing you to use H.264 from legal perspective.
Video, MP4 container (likely with a creamy H.264 center)
Audio, MP3
Transcript, HTML
Were it not for the transcript, you'd have to use a patented codec to consume that content. Even as it is, if you want more than a boring, flat, text file, you need to interact with MP3 or H.264 codecs.
It appears that everything on the Whitehouse video site is in MP4/H.264 formats. The basic message is: Pay up for the codecs or you don't get to enjoy that content from the President.
Darl is of negligible height, standing on the surface of the Earth which we can regard as a sphere of mass 6.0 x 10^24 kg and radius 6.3 x 10^6 m.
High Earth Orbit (HEO) is roughly 3.6 x 10^7 m above the Earth; Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is 1.60 x 10^5 - 2.0 * 10^6 m above, so let's use the lower number for the bare minimum.
Assume a human head masses around 5kg. But take out the brains and just use the skull, and we're talking ~ 1 kg.
Oh, yes, and Gravity (constant) is 6.67 x 10^-11
Given these numbers, how many kg of gunpowder would you need to shove into a.45 cartridge (warning: may not be physically possible) to get Darl's skull into LEO and into HEO?
"I'd also like to be there when they cut off Darl McBride's head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations of intellectual property lawyers that for some favors, even $600 is too high a price. I would look up into his lifeless eyes and wave, like this. *smileywave*. Can you the United States Trustees arrange that for me, Judge Stewart?"
The thing is, Vir, if you're saying that Darl is just the front man for a Shadowy evil, then what are we in store for next?
ARM and W-CDMA work in similar ways. ARM happens to own the patents and licenses them to whomever for a reasonable fee. W-CDMA works in much the same way as H.264. You have a bunch of companies that decide to share patents into one resource. It makes it easy for other companies to pay 1 fee and then use the technology. And H.264's licensing terms are reasonable. There is a cost of doing business. I know that is not popular around here, but it's the truth.
But for comparison here, if I own an ARM computer and make a video or some kind of word processing document on it, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from opening that video or that document on your computer with an x86 chip (at least nothing related to the origin of the file being an ARM-powered device).
If you create a video or audio file and encode it with codec XYZ, you can bet your sweet pile of software patents that when you send that file to me I'm going to have to use information about that codec to turn that file back into something my eyes and ears can understand. I have no choice.
Similarly, my phone doesn't have to support W-CDMA for me to be able to call you. I can just use a POTS line. Or use a GSM phone. Sure, I am more limited than I would be were there no software or hardware patents, but at least I have choices.
Unfortunately it's going to be harder for Free software going forward. Try writing an opensource point-of-sale or e-commerce program that can directly process credit cards. You can't without spending around $20,000 for PA-DSS auditing.
For those curious folk, here's the wikipaedia link for PA-DSS. It appears that people have discussed the PA-DSS + FOSS question before and it really sounds like it's just and issue of someone stepping up and taking control of the process.
Sure, you'll have to pay some money to have the software audited. Sure, you'll have to provide information about how the team audits and creates new releases of the software. Sure, you'll have to jump through certain hoops. But that's what it took when OpenSSL got FIPS 140-2 validation.
If he's changed the licence after publishing, it's too late - the app is open source. You can't pull back a licence you've already granted.
That's actually a very interesting question. If you downloaded his project from github before he changed the license, then there would be no question that you could use the code under the old license. But if you were to download an old revision of his code from github or download HEAD and roll it back today, could you use the older version of the code under the old license?
What if you maintain a FOSS program in git and learn at some point that one of your employees checked-in a proprietary-licensed library due to a misunderstanding? Let's say that no external people have ever cloned the repo, so you just revert the commit in git, making a note that the library isn't licensed for your use.
If someone clones your repo in the future, is just a revert good enough? Or should you git-filter-branch the whole repository to remove every trace of that proprietary-licensed library?
(Providing the previous licence actually was open source, but I don't see why not.)
The previous license looked like a mashup of 2-clause BSD and MIT, both of which are compatible so-called "permissive" licenses. So, short answer = likely yes.
...AMD's prepping for their integrated CPU/GPU launch.... I would image that better Linux drivers might come down the pipeline, though...they'd definitely loose out on a potential market if they completely ignored the issue.
I'd go one step further and say that I think that AMD has an opportunity to highlight their hardware here.
Intel's CPUs and integrated graphics have long had great support in the Linux kernel. Because Intel controls the tech, they can actually provide the correct and full source for the graphics drivers. The problem is that Intel integrated graphics aren't ever anything special.
If AMD is seriously working on integrating their graphics cards and processors -- perhaps even onto the same die -- then they have an opportunity to provide a much more powerful, integrated hardware platform with fully-open drivers. Intel can't compete with that kind of setup, especially as NVidea appears to have an aversion to opening the source to their graphics card drivers.
The Briefs code is now up on GitHub, and yes, you can go look at it, however it's not "Open Source" (per OSI), it's not "Free Software" (per the FSF), and it's not "DFSG-free" (per Debian).
If you look at the commit history for the license, he even explicitly changed the license two days ago to make it less free:
2010-08-28 Modified license terms to disallow someone from reselling Briefs without making major modifications. Also protect the Briefs trademark. Still, free source code, huh? Not too shabby.
Prior to two days ago, the code was under the... well, I'm not exactly sure what license!
Here's the license (the first paragraph is a dead ringer for the opening of the MIT License):
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction except as noted below, including without limitation the rights to use,copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, and/or sublicense, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
Here's the non-FOSS part:
The Software and/or source code cannot be copied in whole and
sold without meaningful modification for a profit.
This is more of the MIT license:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in
the documentation and/or other materials provided with
the distribution.
Actually, there are only two clauses there, so that's essentially the 2-clause BSD, not the 3-clause one (just a minor point, really).
Then we get the YELLING-AT-YOU indemnification clause. Lawyers seem to love these things, but they seem so uncouth to me. Anyhow, for 5 points, from which license was this paragraph chosen?
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
That's right! It's the indemnification clause from the MIT license.
I googled around trying to figure out if other people used this same license, but the best I came up with was the NCSA license. It's unlikely that this license is based off that one, as the phrase to deal in the Software (MIT) is used in this new license instead of to deal with the Software (NCSA).
One more thing: let's point out exactly why the license doesn't pass any of the most popular FOSS metrics:
What if you or your wife want to bang someone on the kitchen table?
Two kitchens == two kitchen tables?
I mean, presumably, anyhow. Having just one table betwixt the two would be poor planning.
Or were you more concerned about the video equipment? I mean, I assumed it was a given that you'd mount the stuff on the wall to keep it away from food spills, hot pans, or whatever else goes down in your kitchen.
Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the media companies to sell their media DRM-free....Convincing them to license their media to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable media marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.
Like any big company, I think that Apple will run with a plan if it can make them money. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't have the power to get big media to distribute their content DRM-free. (And even if Apple could, would they bother?)
Let's imagine if someone did the same to Google
on
The Case For Oracle
·
· Score: 1
Google decided to use the java language in Android. It appears that they did so because it was a decent programming language and many programmers were already familiar with it. For licensing reasons they didn't use Sun's branded Java runtime, but instead pieced together their own compiler and set of class libraries from multiple sources.
Sun didn't like what Google was doing (says various sources), but no legal action was taken until Oracle swallowed up Sun and levied a double-combo patent-and-copyright lawsuit against Google.
---
So, if those are the facts, what would happen if some big company like Oracle, Yahoo, or Apple were to do something similar to Google?
Unlike Java(tm), Go is under a BSD license, and includes a patent grant to all relevant patents that Google owns or can license to you. So if Apple or Amazon or whomever wanted to create a programming layer on top of which proprietary software could be written, you could just use Go as it exists right now and Google wouldn't be able to sue. (It's unclear what motivation Google would have to sue, anyhow)
While I'm a strong supporter of Free Software, I'm quite opposed to tying-up the specs of programming languages, file formats, and transmission protocols using copyrights, patents, or trade secrets, even if only under a Free Software license . Sure, an optimized version of a compiler or a parser might be available under a more restrictive license, however one should not be held over a barrel due to the programming language they used or the format in which they decided to store their data or code. Those specifications and programming features necessary for implementation should be completely unencumbered.
Slashdot Mirror
After Samsung "announced that it is adopting the Mali [GPU]...for its future graphics-enabled ...SoC ICs", it sounds plausible that the speedup and the lack of information about the GPU could relate to this Mali technology from ARM.
ARM has recently released source for some parts of the Linux drivers for current Mali GPUs under GPLv2, which might be the first step towards ARM SoC's with fully-open GPU drivers.
There are no guarantees, but at the moment it appears that ARM is much more receptive to the idea of open GPU drivers than Imagination Tech (PowerVR GPUs) or NVidea.
I think it's a shame that AMD isn't moving faster w.r.t the embedded/mobile market. Sure, they're planning to make SoC's with a GPU on the same silicon, but as of last week they're not currently interested in competing with ARM for market share. And AMD's the chipmaker that's most actively supporting and creating open drivers for their graphics hardware.
It'll be interesting to see where the hardware goes in the next couple of years. Can Intel (and AMD, if they get serious) pull marketshare from ARM, or will the RISC chip reign supreme?
I would also like to nominate "Super Mighty Elephant Connector" for a name.
Sounds like the kind of connector name you'd see on a cheap-o Chinese knock-off product.
I would expect this to be the standard 30-pin PDMI connector also found on the Dell Streak.
Hmm... so why don't they just come out and label it as such?
And if there's only one product out on the market using it, it's a little amusing to call it "a standard connector." I haven't heard anything about this connector -- is it going to be widely available, or is it just one more connector that needs a separate cable in my toolbox?
It looks like the PDMI connector is supposed to be electrically compatible with DisplayPort, USB, and analog audio. Why couldn't they just make a plug that looked like a combination of those plugs? That way consumers could either use the all-in-one combo-plug, or plug in individual, standard plugs that they probably already own!
Take a look at the images here and tell me that's not some kind of proprietary, non-standard connector.
The most notes I could find on it were:
"Connectivity
30 pin connector"
What the fsck, Samsung? Why couldn't you just have used the industry standard microUSB plug?
Ugghhh...
I've talked with the guy briefly before on SFLC matters. He seems like a pretty level-headed guy and also runs the Pub Patent Foundation. I finally got around to RTFA, and here's what he said:
"It chills competition, it misleads the public and takes away from the credit patent holders deserve," says Daniel Ravicher, founder and executive director of New York nonprofit Public Patent Foundation, which has filed numerous suits.
Mr. Ravicher says he found one defendant, Johnson & Johnson's McNeil-PPC unit, by perusing his local drugstore shelves, where he found a bottle of Tylenol he says had an expired patent. Johnson & Johnson declined to comment.
I can totally understand the outrage if after the time of patent expiry someone in management at, say, Johnson & Johnson, added a patent number to a bottle mold or label, but what if they're just reusing an existing stock of bottles, labels, or molds?
To break down Ravicher's claims:
[leaving expired patent numbers on items] chills competition
I'm really not seeing it at all.
Let's just take the example of Tylenol. There's no way, no how that any company large enough to successfully manufacture FDA-approved generic acetaminophen would be inconvenienced by an out-of-date patent on a bottle of Tylenol. The patent information (unlike the totally disorganized registry of copyright renewals) is AFAIK all there online, for anyone to see, including whether or not the patent rights are still in effect.
Here are some times when it sounds reasonable fine or sue a company:
- A patent is listed on a product, but the patent is not owned or licensed by the company (I believe that's straight-up infringement)
- A patent is listed on a product, but it never was a real patent (I believe that's fraud)
- A patent is listed on a product, but the patent doesn't apply to the product
- A patent is first listed on a product After the patent has expired
[leaving expired patent numbers on items] misleads the public
In a very, very small way, yes, I guess it could.
But where's the harm caused by it? I'd argue that all of the crazy ads by drug companies do a lot more harm and cause a lot more confusion than out-of-date patent numbers on drug bottles.
Let's just think rationally here for a moment. In order for expired patent numbers on pill bottles to mislead the public, we'd have to have a person
1) read the patent number on the pill bottle.
2) try to use that patent number information in some manner in which the expiration date matters
Heck, how many people check to see if the pills themselves have expired?
Except for business purposes, I really don't see a "personal use" case in which the patent numbers have any relevancy to the end user. And in a business situation, a list of patents can be trivially checked.
[leaving expired patent numbers on items] takes away from the credit patent holders deserve
This seems like a "sloppiness" argument -- basically, if patent owners or licensors are too lazy to list patents on manufactured goods correctly, and remove them immediately upon their expiry, then they should pay a hefty fee.
I can, to a limited extent, agree with this point. But the problem here is that I've had to deal with another part of our nation's "limited monoploy" (i.e. IP) system, namely the minefield that is copyright and copyright extensions. If only all parts of this system were to operate with the same exacting, no-holds-bared, no-fine-withheld attitude that the Patent Office is taking here, then perhaps I'd be on board.
Maybe the point of this whole law is to get people to file fewer patents and to get them to less aggressively protect patented items with listed patent numbers on them. I seriously can't believe that's the case, but I'll accept it and move on. I don't have any patents myself, and I'm not planing
This guy
I'd say I was a hoopy frood, but (alas) I often don't know where my towel is!
went into a thrift store, found something he had no idea what it was then paid his money to purchase it and bring it home
The nice thing is that (1) I paid maybe 50 cents for the thing, and (2) all of the profit from the store goes to helping the needy in the community.
Generally speaking it works like this: I get to go and satisfy any find-new-stuff shopping cravings, I don't spend much, and the money goes to those in need. It's pretty much a win-win(-win ?) situation.
and try to figure out what it was..it's actually quite fun and I know many people who love discovering old stuff and figuring out what it is.
It's rather fun to have old, working kitchen tools that are somewhat rare...such as this old hand-cranked kitchen slicer.
Besides, it's a much better use than what the actual purpose of the patent markings are (isn't it just to raise the damages in court when they sue?)
I figure that's the main reason people put markings on items. That and to proactively prevent people from knocking-off your designs...
All these suggestions of "print an expiration" miss one thing...expiration date is not set in stone...
Yet another reason to just print the number by itself. As with most design, K.I.S.S.
So if you want to protect your shit you just designed, the government encourages you to put a patent number on the device, often formed into the very metal or plastic comprising the casing or body of your thingamajig.
Then, at some time in the future, when the patent expires, you can't use that mold or casting tool anymore and have to build a new one, because otherwise it's false advertising?
Even if the mold says "This item is covered by patent #xxxxxxx," isn't it useful for further innovation that anyone can just type in that number and find the patent that describes the item?
For example: I just bought a weird kitchen tool at the thrift store the other day and was puzzled as to its precise use until I typed in the patent number on it and found out that it was an ice cube chunker (it works pretty well, too -- no, I'm sorry, I forget the patent # off the top of my head). Had it not had a patent number on it, I'd probably still be trying to squeeze citrus with it or something!
So here's the tradeoff as I see it:
A) Keeping the numbers in place, with the big benefit to identifying items AND giving new innovators an easy starting point for further progress in the Useful Arts, versus
B) Mandating removal so that a small handful of people who can't enter a number into Google or do basic subtraction can determine if a patent has expired.
Good job, congress, the law's really protecting us what good!
*shakes head*
... I know that you're out there, watching over us like some kind of lyrical nerdcore angels.
Time to autotune Snoop Dogg talking about this project...
"Bringin' the attention level up"
'Sho nuff!
"A lot of people don't even realize this is happening"
What about George? He chronicles tech problems he's havening.
"We come together and join forces to fight this"
Are you going to go to Russia and dump crackers in an abyss?
"When my team come after you we're gonna git you"
Get all up ins your binary code, and zero you out, foo !
"To see what it takes to be Snoop Dogg"
I'll know if I can see it through this Chronically hazy fog!
"To put them in the circle with my people"
Are we playing duck duck goose, or ring around the steeple?
"Hopefully it'll rub off on them"
Just as long as no charges stick of possessing illegal chem!
"The secret to longevity is fun"
What about those SPAMers who just want to supersize your Love Gun?
"I love being a leader"
Well, I'll bet that part is true...
"I love owning"
Fo' processor sizzle, Snoop, yeah, me too!
Otherwise it will hit the earth again...
By G'Quan, he would make a very satisfying thump when he hits the ground, no?
And come to think of it, why is it that everyone seems so excited about doing something with Darl's detached head? Maybe SCO could auction the head off and make enough money to keep on going for a couple of years...
..woof! Now there's a scary thought!
There is no talk of making any codec mandatory for HTML5 video. None.
Well, there were Ogg formats in the draft HTML5 spec. But then they were pulled out because Nokia and Apple got all tantrum-y about the whole thing. Really.
Having a default video codec would mean that people could just assume that there's Ogg Theora playback... or that there's Ogg Vorbis playback. Actually, as much contention as there was about Ogg Theora, I don't understand why people couldn't just compromise on getting Ogg Vorbis stuck in there. Even implemented in software, the iPhone and other handheld hardware could decode files very easily, and at least we'd finally be on our way towards sticking a fork in MP3.
HTML5 video specifically relies on the underlying browser (or OS) to provide decoding.
By definition, yes (unless you're relying on in-the-cloud decoding or magical pixies or something...), but I digress.
Just as you can put whatever kind of image you want in an img tag and rely on the browser to render it (if it can)...
Many browsers can't handle TIFF files, or BMP files, and last I checked IE had problems with PNGs and mostly barfed on SVG...
Most browsers (ie not Firefox) pass on video decoding to the operating system.
Many browsers may do so, but Firefox still has ~ 31% of the marketshare, about twice as much as Chrome, Safari, and Opera combined (source: wikipedia).
So what I'm saying is: Don't write off Fox... or the big red dinosaur (take your pick).
As most users have OS X or Windows, for which free, licensed h.264 decoders are readily available
That's free as in 'freeware', not Free as in Freedom.
or Linux with a GPU that has a hardware (also licensed) h.264 decoder
I actually don't know the numbers on this one and I'm curious about it. What percentage of hardware shipped today (desktops, servers, handhelds, etc...) has a fully-licensed (by the MPEG-LA) hardware decoder for H.264 in it?
And I'm no lawyer, but I wouldn't put it past the MPEG-LA to sue someone for using an H.264 software decoder, even if the hardware they were running it on had a fully-licensed hardware decoder in it.
most users don't have to worry about all this licensing malarkey.
I really wish that this were true, but I'm afraid that it's not the case. Just think for a second -- the H.264 hardware is only licensed for decoding not encoding. So if you want to upload a video from your DV-cam to your website or put it in your presentation, you'll need a license to go along with whatever software you use (or you'll need to pay a fee for software that includes such a license).
I'd root for Google's standard if it didn't suck balls so much and have practically no hardware support.
I'm no codec hacker, but I thought the whole point about all of this so-called "hardware" support was that it wasn't actually baked into silicon, but was low-level code that could be loaded onto DSPs. AFAIK google has 14 vendors working on hardware support, so it's just going to take a little time for that to make it to market.
And yes, it sounds like the VP8 codec needs ongoing help to get it whipped into shape. But given that people like a few FFMpeg developers have written much faster decoders than the reference one, it sounds like that work is well underway.
But that [PA-DSS...] is a legal requirement, not a licensing requirement.
Actually, according to the Wikipedia page (see the link in my comment below), it appears that PA-DSS is just an industry standard, not one bearing any requirements under current law.
The article does point out that the Legislature (Big "L") is/was considering putting into effect laws to regulate such systems, and it's highly likely that such legislation would build from current industry practices, but AFAIK there's actually nothing outside de-facto standardization at the moment.
Turning to H.264...
No one's forcing you to use H.264 from legal perspective.
Actually, I think that they might be. Here's a video from the President. It's available as
Were it not for the transcript, you'd have to use a patented codec to consume that content. Even as it is, if you want more than a boring, flat, text file, you need to interact with MP3 or H.264 codecs.
It appears that everything on the Whitehouse video site is in MP4/H.264 formats. The basic message is: Pay up for the codecs or you don't get to enjoy that content from the President.
I'd be willing to donate a 8lb keg of HP38 to do some testing
How many is that?
Android Rules...and Droid Does...hmmm.
If past confusingly-worded advertisements are any indication, we should look forward to:
Android: Try our new interface for waterproof phones: Slip and Slide Rules!
Lorien_the_first_one (1178397)
You know something is wrong with the Universe when Lorien's UID is longer than your own...
We could call it the .45 BSD.
I'd be half tempted to call it the ".45 in your FACE!"... which is...actually...rather quite appropriate for our purposes.
Okay,
Assumptions (mostly from wikipedia):
Given these numbers, how many kg of gunpowder would you need to shove into a .45 cartridge (warning: may not be physically possible) to get Darl's skull into LEO and into HEO?
"I'd also like to be there when they cut off Darl McBride's head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations of intellectual property lawyers that for some favors, even $600 is too high a price. I would look up into his lifeless eyes and wave, like this. *smileywave*. Can you the United States Trustees arrange that for me, Judge Stewart?"
The thing is, Vir, if you're saying that Darl is just the front man for a Shadowy evil, then what are we in store for next?
ARM and W-CDMA work in similar ways. ARM happens to own the patents and licenses them to whomever for a reasonable fee. W-CDMA works in much the same way as H.264. You have a bunch of companies that decide to share patents into one resource. It makes it easy for other companies to pay 1 fee and then use the technology. And H.264's licensing terms are reasonable. There is a cost of doing business. I know that is not popular around here, but it's the truth.
But for comparison here, if I own an ARM computer and make a video or some kind of word processing document on it, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from opening that video or that document on your computer with an x86 chip (at least nothing related to the origin of the file being an ARM-powered device).
If you create a video or audio file and encode it with codec XYZ, you can bet your sweet pile of software patents that when you send that file to me I'm going to have to use information about that codec to turn that file back into something my eyes and ears can understand. I have no choice.
Similarly, my phone doesn't have to support W-CDMA for me to be able to call you. I can just use a POTS line. Or use a GSM phone. Sure, I am more limited than I would be were there no software or hardware patents, but at least I have choices.
Unfortunately it's going to be harder for Free software going forward. Try writing an opensource point-of-sale or e-commerce program that can directly process credit cards. You can't without spending around $20,000 for PA-DSS auditing.
For those curious folk, here's the wikipaedia link for PA-DSS. It appears that people have discussed the PA-DSS + FOSS question before and it really sounds like it's just and issue of someone stepping up and taking control of the process.
Sure, you'll have to pay some money to have the software audited. Sure, you'll have to provide information about how the team audits and creates new releases of the software. Sure, you'll have to jump through certain hoops. But that's what it took when OpenSSL got FIPS 140-2 validation.
If he's changed the licence after publishing, it's too late - the app is open source. You can't pull back a licence you've already granted.
That's actually a very interesting question. If you downloaded his project from github before he changed the license, then there would be no question that you could use the code under the old license. But if you were to download an old revision of his code from github or download HEAD and roll it back today, could you use the older version of the code under the old license?
What if you maintain a FOSS program in git and learn at some point that one of your employees checked-in a proprietary-licensed library due to a misunderstanding? Let's say that no external people have ever cloned the repo, so you just revert the commit in git, making a note that the library isn't licensed for your use.
If someone clones your repo in the future, is just a revert good enough? Or should you git-filter-branch the whole repository to remove every trace of that proprietary-licensed library?
(Providing the previous licence actually was open source, but I don't see why not.)
The previous license looked like a mashup of 2-clause BSD and MIT, both of which are compatible so-called "permissive" licenses. So, short answer = likely yes.
...AMD's prepping for their integrated CPU/GPU launch. ...
I would image that better Linux drivers might come down the pipeline, though...they'd definitely loose out on a potential market if they completely ignored the issue.
I'd go one step further and say that I think that AMD has an opportunity to highlight their hardware here.
Intel's CPUs and integrated graphics have long had great support in the Linux kernel. Because Intel controls the tech, they can actually provide the correct and full source for the graphics drivers. The problem is that Intel integrated graphics aren't ever anything special.
If AMD is seriously working on integrating their graphics cards and processors -- perhaps even onto the same die -- then they have an opportunity to provide a much more powerful, integrated hardware platform with fully-open drivers. Intel can't compete with that kind of setup, especially as NVidea appears to have an aversion to opening the source to their graphics card drivers.
The Briefs code is now up on GitHub, and yes, you can go look at it, however it's not "Open Source" (per OSI), it's not "Free Software" (per the FSF), and it's not "DFSG-free" (per Debian).
If you look at the commit history for the license, he even explicitly changed the license two days ago to make it less free:
2010-08-28
Modified license terms to disallow someone from reselling Briefs without making major modifications. Also protect the Briefs trademark. Still, free source code, huh? Not too shabby.
Prior to two days ago, the code was under the... well, I'm not exactly sure what license!
Here's the license (the first paragraph is a dead ringer for the opening of the MIT License):
Copyright (c) 2009-2010, Rob Rhyne
Briefs is a trademark of Digital Arch Design Corp.
http://robrhyne.com/
http://digitalarch.net/
All rights reserved.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without
restriction except as noted below, including without limitation
the rights to use,copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute,
and/or sublicense, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
Here's the non-FOSS part:
The Software and/or source code cannot be copied in whole and
sold without meaningful modification for a profit.
This is more of the MIT license:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
This middle part looks like the BSD license:
Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in
the documentation and/or other materials provided with
the distribution.
Actually, there are only two clauses there, so that's essentially the 2-clause BSD, not the 3-clause one (just a minor point, really).
Then we get the YELLING-AT-YOU indemnification clause. Lawyers seem to love these things, but they seem so uncouth to me. Anyhow, for 5 points, from which license was this paragraph chosen?
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES
OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
That's right! It's the indemnification clause from the MIT license.
I googled around trying to figure out if other people used this same license, but the best I came up with was the NCSA license. It's unlikely that this license is based off that one, as the phrase to deal in the Software (MIT) is used in this new license instead of to deal with the Software (NCSA).
One more thing: let's point out exactly why the license doesn't pass any of the most popular FOSS metrics:
1) "Open Source" (per OSI)
Per
What if you or your wife want to bang someone on the kitchen table?
Two kitchens == two kitchen tables?
I mean, presumably, anyhow. Having just one table betwixt the two would be poor planning.
Or were you more concerned about the video equipment? I mean, I assumed it was a given that you'd mount the stuff on the wall to keep it away from food spills, hot pans, or whatever else goes down in your kitchen.
Here's a quote from something Jobs said, but with s/music/media/.
Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the media companies to sell their media DRM-free....Convincing them to license their media to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable media marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.
Like any big company, I think that Apple will run with a plan if it can make them money. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't have the power to get big media to distribute their content DRM-free. (And even if Apple could, would they bother?)
Google decided to use the java language in Android. It appears that they did so because it was a decent programming language and many programmers were already familiar with it. For licensing reasons they didn't use Sun's branded Java runtime, but instead pieced together their own compiler and set of class libraries from multiple sources.
Sun didn't like what Google was doing (says various sources), but no legal action was taken until Oracle swallowed up Sun and levied a double-combo patent-and-copyright lawsuit against Google.
---
So, if those are the facts, what would happen if some big company like Oracle, Yahoo, or Apple were to do something similar to Google?
Google has their own programming language, Go.
Unlike Java(tm), Go is under a BSD license, and includes a patent grant to all relevant patents that Google owns or can license to you. So if Apple or Amazon or whomever wanted to create a programming layer on top of which proprietary software could be written, you could just use Go as it exists right now and Google wouldn't be able to sue. (It's unclear what motivation Google would have to sue, anyhow)
While I'm a strong supporter of Free Software, I'm quite opposed to tying-up the specs of programming languages, file formats, and transmission protocols using copyrights, patents, or trade secrets, even if only under a Free Software license . Sure, an optimized version of a compiler or a parser might be available under a more restrictive license, however one should not be held over a barrel due to the programming language they used or the format in which they decided to store their data or code. Those specifications and programming features necessary for implementation should be completely unencumbered.