Brother-In-Mac-Zealotry! Desist from this blasphemous recitation of empirical evidence which heaps dishonor and opprobrium upon the pure titanium shininess of whatever crap Apple has sold to us. Mere mathematics and energy efficiency are sins of the flesh which must not sully the discourse concerning the One True Hardware Monopolist or the Doctrines of Jobs.
Anyway, global warming isn't happening fast enough to convince the skeptics so it's necessary that we do our bit by using 20 times as much power to browse slashdot. We've all got to do our bit.
OIN isn't any use in this situation. The OIN helps to create a Mexican standoff with other companies which might want to use patents to advance their businesses at the expense of other competitors. The important thing is that the aggressors also produce software in that scenario. So it cools down the relationship between Sony, IBM, Sun, Microsoft, Intel, Red Hat, Novell etc and stops them from attacking each other directly.
In this case however the aggressor does not make software. They're just a patent troll: a buch of sleazy fuck lawyers that buy patent rights and then sue anyone they can, hoping that they'll find a jury as dumb as the folks in Duluth.
The interesting thing about this case is that the aggressor (IP Innovation) appears to be a subsidiary of Acacia, who recently... very recently... hired two very senior Microsoft employees, the last hire being a specialist in so-called "IP law". So, is this company just a front for Microsoft? It's certainly mighty convenient.
The other VERY interesting facet of this is why Red Hat and Novell? It can easily be argued that just about any modern desktop environment would be open to such claims if the patent were taken seriously. It could just possibly be that Novell will be indemnified by Microsoft against this threat, thereby "proving" that if you don't buy GNU/Microsoft/Linux (aka Novell/OpenSUSE) then the patent lawyers will come after you.
Agree completely. It's to do with how many packages there are and how carefully they're created. Debian probably still has a slight advantage in this area over other distros. The community process (with mentoring and package review and good standards) is excellent. I believe that Fedora is going in the right direction with this stuff and has learnt from the lessons of Debian.
I appreciate that you say that you haven't used an RPM based distro for several years. I think you'd find if you tried one now that the tools (such as YUM and PUP and SMART) simplify package managament greatly. When you add to this that the quality and quantity of RPM packaging (now 5000 packages for Fedora) is going up there really isn't much of a case to make for debs and distros based on them being superior. Add to this that there are examples of "Deb-hell" if you look for them.
The reason that debs used to be superior was because of the Debian community working together to package Free software according to agreed high standards. It's a pity that more people don't explicitly acknowledge that Ubuntu is just a slightly tweaked distro sitting on top of all this work done by the Debian community.
deep down everyone knows that linux distros (not linux itself, necessarily) violate patents en masse
What a bogus, unsupported allegation. Either cite a violation or clam up. Oh! wait, here's one:
As an example, VideoLan admits that their VLC player runs afoul of mpegla patents
VLC is not packaged by either the Fedora Project, or by Red Hat, with the codecs which may/may not be infringing. Looks like your "deep down truths" are not so truthful.
But big companies like Red Hat *can* pay the necessary patent fees, and they shouldn't be getting a free ride.
Red Hat does not infringe any patents. So it's not getting any free ride. Furthermore it has to waste resources on legal counsel instead of coders in order to help in the creation, defense and maintenance of the Open Invention Network. (The legal counsel are excellent and do a good job. Mark Webbink especially seems like a top-notch guy).
Anyway, you're full of it. You can't even cite ONE, not ONE actual instance of patent infringement and neither can Microsoft because it doesn't exist.
"Intellectual property" is a misleading portmanteau of completely separate branches of law: trademarks, copyrights and patents. But the OIN despite the badly worded mission statement concentrates on patents. Specifically its a defensive patent pool (with contributions from Red Hat, Sun, Novell, IBM and others) which can be licensed by any company agreeing not to use its own patents in aggressive lawsuits against pool members.
Currently the three largest licensess are Google, Barracuda and Sun.
Given the current lamentable state of the patent system the OIN is probably the only way in which some sanity can be established. It must be awkward to be Novell right now having endorsed the OIN on one hand, and also endorsed the existence of Microsoft's Snuffleupagus Patents.
And has been discovered to have significant flaws which allow leeching of community IP by Tivo and the undermining of the community by Novell.
I'd agree that not many people are interested in sticking it to Microsoft, but most of use are not interested in having Microsoft stick it to us either. That's why the GPLv3 is necessary: community protection. If it doesn't get used in enough projects then we'll be looking back at 2007 as the hey-day of Free Software.
Oh, I don't think they're unrelated. Novell's strategy is clearly to be a parasite on the "Open Source" community. Microsoft can use them to reap revenue/and/ simultaneously undermine the threat, so they win either way. Novell's only hope of surviving as a distro is to make sure that: 1) as few projects as possible adopt GPLv3; 2) they don't make any copyright assignments which allow projects to later relicense the work as GPLv3.
We've seen Greg Kroah-Hartmann's recent announcement of a GPLv2 only driver project (with copyright assignments to them, thus precluding relicensing later as GPLv3), now we see them ensuring that they have an office suite. This is a good make-or-break time to put pressure on sun and hopefully sway enough contributors/developers to go with the Novell fork, because Sun let's face it, are not particulary nice trustworthy guys either. If they want OO.o to be an actual Free project then they need to set up a non-profit foundation like Mozilla, but Sun can't afford to take that risk because it's the last thing keeping the possibility of an OpenSolaris gaining traction in the enterprise desktop.
MichaelMeeks admits in his own blog posts that the purpose of the JointCopyrightAssignment is to allow the holder to change the licensing: Novell's fear is that sun will license it as GPLv3 instead of LGPL.
This is all Novell trying to make sure that they harvest as much community IP as possible before people start pulling up the drawbridges and dropping the portcullises.
So this has nothing to do with Novell shying away from the JCA which could see them forking some of your useful contributions into a GPLv3 version sometime down the road?;)
The licese is explicitly and intentionally designed to allow open-source code to be used for any purpose
Given that the license is largely the brainchild of Richard Stallman who has emphasized again and again that what's interesting to him is FREEDOM I'd say that the license is explicitly and intentionally designed to promote that freedom. I highly doubt that the propping up of patents which restrict that freedom was part of the intent.
Well one of the "pragmatic" reasons advanced for the kernel not moving any time soon was the difficulties of getting a few major contributors like Greg K-H to move to GPLv3. Greg has gone so far as to try and discourage people from using the "GPLv2 or any later" wording to ensure that things stay as GPLv2. A kernel isn't much use without drivers and now lo! and behold Greg is heading up a project which out of the choices of:
GPLv2 only
GPLv2 or any later version
GPLv3
decides to plump for GPLv2 only. Coincidence? I think not.
But watch out and make sure it's not one of the models that has the crappy ATI video chip which is mounted by a Ball Grid Array that tends to break loose even if you treat the laptop like your firstborn.
That was my initial reaction, but then I poked around on the project wiki and noticed that they were specifically trying to get GPLv2 licensed drivers. Then I remembered that Greg K-H was one of the developers who tried to fuck up the release of GPLv3 and the bits all clicked into place. This is Novell trying to ensure that they have a supply of GPLv2 drivers available so that they can continue their filthy pact with Microsoft which will be finished if most people release their work as GPLv3.
Yahoo has a nicer name: Pipes. Admittedly it's just a straightforward rip-off of the UNIX concept, but it's more expressive of what's happening really. Someone pointed out that the whole Web2.0 thing is just taking whatever good CLI stuff worked nicely and slapping a webpage interface on top of it. So:
The OK Labs approach is interesting too and they specifically claim that their approach is secure. The latter paper has good historical background on the history of microkernels (which you may already be aware of) and mentions some that I hadn't heard of including IntegrityOS which is supposedly widely deployed in the military. Worth a read.
Making blanket statements about "the Linux guys" or "Linux" is so fucking inaccurate and stupid. The patch was carried in NO MAJOR GNU/LINUX DISTRO. Got that?! I'll put in bold and emphasis for you below so that your brain has a chance to absorb the point: NO GNU/LINUX DISTROS CARRIED THE PATCHNo GNU/Linux distros carried the patch.
Now, please, shut the fuck up.
That actually sounds like the definition of a good business model to me - sell licenses for a fee. Incidentally, how much money have you spent on maintainance contracts for free software?
Per annum we spend approximately $20,000 on a mix of RHEL base 12/5 and 24/7 supported systems. It's worth it. We used to spend more on VMWare, but luckily that's not happening anymore and we're using Xen.
Maybe you should try the same argument next time you see something you like in a shop.
Oh. OK. You really are confused then, maintenance contracts are not tangible goods. Software is not a tangible good. Trying to create a business model around the fiction that it's a tangible good is a dead end.
Sure it is. It states that "Open Sourcing" will lead to a non-sustainable, non-commercial business. That's contention is pure FUD. I gave at least two major examples that disprove that contention. The company behind QNX would be in a prime position to derive revenue from custom development work and maintenance contracts from hardware manufacturers. Instead they're chosing to try and hold on to a confused business model where they try to fool themselves and their customers into believing that the customers have to pay for the software.
QNX has undoubted technical benefits but it's going nowhere fast with this.
Yes, it's interesting that Larry Rosen is busy spreading FUD when he claims stuff like:
Open Source licenses... relinquish[..] all control over their intellectual property and giving it away for free (pg.2)
or counterpoises OSS with... the sustainability of a royalty-based business model for commercial projects {pg.2)
A lawyer involved with licensing issues should be very aware that Intellectual Property is a garbage, meaningless term usually used by people that are seeking to assert greater control over information. He should also be aware that there are very many sustainable and highly profitable Open Source.... gah, let's call them Free Software... projects. Red Hat springs to mind as the most succesful (their entire codebase, including their build-systems and bug-reporting systems are completely Free) as do MySQL AB (ever take a look at their dual-licensing model Larry?).
Basically, this guy is being paid to say "Hey, I'm an Open Sores guy too and I say it's OK, so drink up the tasty chocolate milk and ignore the funny taste from the proprietary ingredient".
QNX is awesome, but this isn't an Free or Open Source license.
Don't they know that it's standard wisdom on Slashdot that microkernels can't work? What's wrong with these guys?!!! Myself, I'm still waiting for GNU/Hurd:)
Oh I know. The shift really happening is with virtualization and before this announcement Intel was the only real Free/Open game in town even though AMD's 64-bit offerings were superior until about a year ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Brother-In-Mac-Zealotry! Desist from this blasphemous recitation of empirical evidence which heaps dishonor and opprobrium upon the pure titanium shininess of whatever crap Apple has sold to us. Mere mathematics and energy efficiency are sins of the flesh which must not sully the discourse concerning the One True Hardware Monopolist or the Doctrines of Jobs.
Anyway, global warming isn't happening fast enough to convince the skeptics so it's necessary that we do our bit by using 20 times as much power to browse slashdot. We've all got to do our bit.
In this case however the aggressor does not make software. They're just a patent troll: a buch of sleazy fuck lawyers that buy patent rights and then sue anyone they can, hoping that they'll find a jury as dumb as the folks in Duluth.
The interesting thing about this case is that the aggressor (IP Innovation) appears to be a subsidiary of Acacia, who recently ... very recently ... hired two very senior Microsoft employees, the last hire being a specialist in so-called "IP law". So, is this company just a front for Microsoft? It's certainly mighty convenient.
The other VERY interesting facet of this is why Red Hat and Novell? It can easily be argued that just about any modern desktop environment would be open to such claims if the patent were taken seriously. It could just possibly be that Novell will be indemnified by Microsoft against this threat, thereby "proving" that if you don't buy GNU/Microsoft/Linux (aka Novell/OpenSUSE) then the patent lawyers will come after you.
Very convenient.
Agree completely. It's to do with how many packages there are and how carefully they're created. Debian probably still has a slight advantage in this area over other distros. The community process (with mentoring and package review and good standards) is excellent. I believe that Fedora is going in the right direction with this stuff and has learnt from the lessons of Debian.
I appreciate that you say that you haven't used an RPM based distro for several years. I think you'd find if you tried one now that the tools (such as YUM and PUP and SMART) simplify package managament greatly. When you add to this that the quality and quantity of RPM packaging (now 5000 packages for Fedora) is going up there really isn't much of a case to make for debs and distros based on them being superior. Add to this that there are examples of "Deb-hell" if you look for them.
The reason that debs used to be superior was because of the Debian community working together to package Free software according to agreed high standards. It's a pity that more people don't explicitly acknowledge that Ubuntu is just a slightly tweaked distro sitting on top of all this work done by the Debian community.
deep down everyone knows that linux distros (not linux itself, necessarily) violate patents en masse
What a bogus, unsupported allegation. Either cite a violation or clam up. Oh! wait, here's one:
As an example, VideoLan admits that their VLC player runs afoul of mpegla patents
VLC is not packaged by either the Fedora Project, or by Red Hat, with the codecs which may/may not be infringing. Looks like your "deep down truths" are not so truthful.
But big companies like Red Hat *can* pay the necessary patent fees, and they shouldn't be getting a free ride.
Red Hat does not infringe any patents. So it's not getting any free ride. Furthermore it has to waste resources on legal counsel instead of coders in order to help in the creation, defense and maintenance of the Open Invention Network. (The legal counsel are excellent and do a good job. Mark Webbink especially seems like a top-notch guy).
Anyway, you're full of it. You can't even cite ONE, not ONE actual instance of patent infringement and neither can Microsoft because it doesn't exist.
"Intellectual property" is a misleading portmanteau of completely separate branches of law: trademarks, copyrights and patents. But the OIN despite the badly worded mission statement concentrates on patents. Specifically its a defensive patent pool (with contributions from Red Hat, Sun, Novell, IBM and others) which can be licensed by any company agreeing not to use its own patents in aggressive lawsuits against pool members.
Currently the three largest licensess are Google, Barracuda and Sun.
David Wheeler has a good overview here
Given the current lamentable state of the patent system the OIN is probably the only way in which some sanity can be established. It must be awkward to be Novell right now having endorsed the OIN on one hand, and also endorsed the existence of Microsoft's Snuffleupagus Patents.
And has been discovered to have significant flaws which allow leeching of community IP by Tivo and the undermining of the community by Novell.
I'd agree that not many people are interested in sticking it to Microsoft, but most of use are not interested in having Microsoft stick it to us either. That's why the GPLv3 is necessary: community protection. If it doesn't get used in enough projects then we'll be looking back at 2007 as the hey-day of Free Software.
Oh, I don't think they're unrelated. Novell's strategy is clearly to be a parasite on the "Open Source" community. Microsoft can use them to reap revenue /and/ simultaneously undermine the threat, so they win either way. Novell's only hope of surviving as a distro is to make sure that: 1) as few projects as possible adopt GPLv3; 2) they don't make any copyright assignments which allow projects to later relicense the work as GPLv3.
We've seen Greg Kroah-Hartmann's recent announcement of a GPLv2 only driver project (with copyright assignments to them, thus precluding relicensing later as GPLv3), now we see them ensuring that they have an office suite. This is a good make-or-break time to put pressure on sun and hopefully sway enough contributors/developers to go with the Novell fork, because Sun let's face it, are not particulary nice trustworthy guys either. If they want OO.o to be an actual Free project then they need to set up a non-profit foundation like Mozilla, but Sun can't afford to take that risk because it's the last thing keeping the possibility of an OpenSolaris gaining traction in the enterprise desktop.
MichaelMeeks admits in his own blog posts that the purpose of the JointCopyrightAssignment is to allow the holder to change the licensing: Novell's fear is that sun will license it as GPLv3 instead of LGPL.
This is all Novell trying to make sure that they harvest as much community IP as possible before people start pulling up the drawbridges and dropping the portcullises.
So this has nothing to do with Novell shying away from the JCA which could see them forking some of your useful contributions into a GPLv3 version sometime down the road? ;)
Given that the license is largely the brainchild of Richard Stallman who has emphasized again and again that what's interesting to him is FREEDOM I'd say that the license is explicitly and intentionally designed to promote that freedom. I highly doubt that the propping up of patents which restrict that freedom was part of the intent.
- GPLv2 only
- GPLv2 or any later version
- GPLv3
decides to plump for GPLv2 only. Coincidence? I think not.But watch out and make sure it's not one of the models that has the crappy ATI video chip which is mounted by a Ball Grid Array that tends to break loose even if you treat the laptop like your firstborn.
agreed. I'm surprised no one else is mentioning this.
That was my initial reaction, but then I poked around on the project wiki and noticed that they were specifically trying to get GPLv2 licensed drivers. Then I remembered that Greg K-H was one of the developers who tried to fuck up the release of GPLv3 and the bits all clicked into place. This is Novell trying to ensure that they have a supply of GPLv2 drivers available so that they can continue their filthy pact with Microsoft which will be finished if most people release their work as GPLv3.
The dude behind this (Rob Ennals) worked for SCO after training in a lab funded by Microsoft. http://berkeley.intel-research.net/rennals/
The OK Labs approach is interesting too and they specifically claim that their approach is secure. The latter paper has good historical background on the history of microkernels (which you may already be aware of) and mentions some that I hadn't heard of including IntegrityOS which is supposedly widely deployed in the military. Worth a read.
Making blanket statements about "the Linux guys" or "Linux" is so fucking inaccurate and stupid. The patch was carried in NO MAJOR GNU/LINUX DISTRO. Got that?! I'll put in bold and emphasis for you below so that your brain has a chance to absorb the point:
NO GNU/LINUX DISTROS CARRIED THE PATCH No GNU/Linux distros carried the patch.
Now, please, shut the fuck up.
Sincerely,
A happy OpenBSD user.
That actually sounds like the definition of a good business model to me - sell licenses for a fee.
Incidentally, how much money have you spent on maintainance contracts for free software?
Per annum we spend approximately $20,000 on a mix of RHEL base 12/5 and 24/7 supported systems. It's worth it. We used to spend more on VMWare, but luckily that's not happening anymore and we're using Xen.
Maybe you should try the same argument next time you see something you like in a shop.
Oh. OK. You really are confused then, maintenance contracts are not tangible goods. Software is not a tangible good. Trying to create a business model around the fiction that it's a tangible good is a dead end.
Nah, round here everyone is a dirty, MacOSX-using, dope-smoking, "web designer" slacker.
It's not FUD.
Sure it is. It states that "Open Sourcing" will lead to a non-sustainable, non-commercial business. That's contention is pure FUD. I gave at least two major examples that disprove that contention. The company behind QNX would be in a prime position to derive revenue from custom development work and maintenance contracts from hardware manufacturers. Instead they're chosing to try and hold on to a confused business model where they try to fool themselves and their customers into believing that the customers have to pay for the software.
QNX has undoubted technical benefits but it's going nowhere fast with this.
Agree 100% I think Linus skirts the borders of dishonesty and misleading people when he pumps his own opinions as "pragmatic".
Yes, it's interesting that Larry Rosen is busy spreading FUD when he claims stuff like: Open Source licenses ... relinquish[..] all control over their intellectual property and giving it away for free (pg.2)
or counterpoises OSS with ... the sustainability of a royalty-based business model for commercial projects {pg.2)
A lawyer involved with licensing issues should be very aware that Intellectual Property is a garbage, meaningless term usually used by people that are seeking to assert greater control over information. He should also be aware that there are very many sustainable and highly profitable Open Source .... gah, let's call them Free Software ... projects. Red Hat springs to mind as the most succesful (their entire codebase, including their build-systems and bug-reporting systems are completely Free) as do MySQL AB (ever take a look at their dual-licensing model Larry?).
Basically, this guy is being paid to say "Hey, I'm an Open Sores guy too and I say it's OK, so drink up the tasty chocolate milk and ignore the funny taste from the proprietary ingredient".
QNX is awesome, but this isn't an Free or Open Source license.
Rosen has just disgraced himself.
Don't they know that it's standard wisdom on Slashdot that microkernels can't work? What's wrong with these guys?!!! Myself, I'm still waiting for GNU/Hurd :)
Oh I know. The shift really happening is with virtualization and before this announcement Intel was the only real Free/Open game in town even though AMD's 64-bit offerings were superior until about a year ago.