The problem with using the Founder's Copyright is that Public Domain is not more free for the aggregate of all people than the GPL would be. It's just an invitation to integrate the public code into private works without returning anything, while the GPL promotes that more code is shared.
Right. Nobody and their legal counsel want to talk about this without an NDA. I am taking on some liability by accepting an NDA and still doing the whole thing for free.
That's your right. Of course, this matters more if you've actually released anything under it.
I should tell you, though, I have had more than one person who used gift-style licenses come crying to me about how badly they were abused. Some decide the GPL is a better idea too late...
Actually, the GPL and a trademark registration will keep just what you're talking about from happening. Going proprietary won't give you any more protection unless you're talking about just locking up the source. But you have to enforce once in a while to keep idiots from breaking the rules.
Forcing the same license requirements on actual changes to the kernel versus imposing the same license restriction on any downstream externally linked code is not going to attract many competent developers or those who specifically employee developers who can extend and enhance the functionality running against the kernel.
Whoa! Aren't you talking about the most successful strategy for developing a kernel ever? There seem to be no shortage of developers of high competence working on the Linux kernel, including those supported by companies. Hey, we even got Microsoft to do it after their earlier and widely publicized GPL paranoia.
I seriously doubt any kernel team, no matter the budget, can come close to what has been done with Linux.
But if Bruce or Eric decide to sue Debian or Canonical (or whomever) for shipping GRSecurity with the kernel, I'll watch while the community turns on them like a pack of &@#$ wolves and their reputation takes a perpetual hit.
Bill,
Debian would have the previous version before this licensing problem came up.
I am not the plaintiff in any theoretical case, and in any case am not interested in suing Debian. That's not me. But this should be a wake-up call to Debian.
Regarding CDDL vs. GPL, Sun quite deliberately applied that license and refused to dual-license. One would imagine they had Linux in mind when that decision was made. Oracle continues that. It doesn't seem that anyone on the Linux side started that fight. And given the decision in Oracle v. Google that copyright can pass across APIs, at Oracle's behest, it does not seem to me that CDDL-GPL combinations are legally safe even if you dynamically link.
Grsecurity recently changed its terms due to widespread abuse of its mark.
Dear AC,
If that's really their intent, they're confused. Or maybe you don't understand? The GPL doesn't have anything to do with trademarks. And Grsecurity did not bother to create a trademark for their product that was different from the versions with the old GPL-only terms, which are still in use. If trademark was the problem, they'd need to create a new one for their commercial product.
This, unfortunately, would not mitigate the GPL issue, which is copyright and contract related.
You should read the entire statement, because there are things missing from the quote above that are important. The most important part is the legal theory:
By operating under their policy of terminating customer relations upon distribution of their GPL-licensed software, Open Source Security Inc., the owner of Grsecurity, creates an expectation that the customer's business will be damaged by losing access to support and later versions of the product, if that customer exercises their re-distribution right under the GPL license. This is tantamount to the addition of a term to the GPL prohibiting distribution or creating a penalty for distribution. GPL section 6 specifically prohibits any addition of terms. Thus, the GPL license, which allows Grsecurity to create its derivative work of the Linux kernel, terminates, and the copyright of the Linux Kernel is infringed. The contract from the Linux kernel developers to both Grsecurity and the customer which is inherent in the GPL is breached.
Also, this is important to keep me in compliance with the law:
I am an intellectual property and technology specialist who advises attorneys, not an attorney. This is my opinion and is offered as advice to your attorney. Please show this to him or her. Under the law of most states, your attorney who is contracted to you is the only party who can provide you with legal advice.
It's important to consider the goals of the GPL. You get great Free Software, but it's not a gift. It is sharing with rules that must be followed. You are required to keep it Free. And one of the implied purposes of the GPL is to cause more great Free Software to be made. This means that derivative works that are not shared really go against the purpose as well as the wording of the GPL.
That's the point. It's not about the kernel. User's don't see kernels at all, don't care about them. Blackberry certainly learned that lesson. All they spent on QNX and the customers yawned.
The point of having them build on Linux was that rather than investing in kernel development, they could move all of that money to things that mattered to the user experience.
I think around the time I got to HP they had just done a Billion dollar investment in new development of HP/UX. IBM in contrast de-emphasized AIX in favor of Linux, understanding the economics better than HP did. Not that this was HP's only problem.
Solving the problem of adequate nutrition for an ever-rising population will still result in Malthusian catastrophe. At some point, no amount of science will be able to feed the number of mouths with the available resources, and of course nature will step in to make the demise sudden with some natural disaster or global-warming-induced disaster.
I consulted briefly for Palm, doing an Open Source training that literally nobody who was invited was interested in hearing. I think they mostly invited the wrong folks. People were really angry that I did things like use examples, rather than just stating the point so that they could get out of there. I usually get good feedback on trainings.
One of their largest problems was that they were unwilling to abandon the 250,000 applications that they stated were built for their original Motorola 68000 architecture. So, when they came out with an ARM-based Palm, that ARM ran a 68000 emulator, and their entire operating system ran in the emulator along with all apps. So, it was obvious this company wasn't agile enough to keep up with new technology.
Of course, I suggested that they base on Linux and build their APIs on top of it. But then, I suggested this to Symbian, too, and they listened just as well - which was not at all. All of those folks thought they had some sort of magic in their kernel and invested unspeakable amounts of money in it. In Palm's case, they had a shared memory architecture that they felt would be difficult to implement on Linux.
Eventually, one of their business successors took on Linux, but way to late to salvage the business.
Falcon 9 can now carry loads originally manifested for Falcon 9 Heavy, albeit in expendable mode. It is competitive with Delta for many of the same missions.
Well, it was reassuring that the Bulgariasat booster has been refurbished at KSC. No trip to McGregor or Hawthorne. So, not interfering with new booster manufacture and probably not work as intensive as the first one.
Where did you find that statement "capsule largely assembled from previously flown components"? That is probably an accurate statement. But what we've been hearing in the news has been much less qualified, mostly sounding as if they'd reflown the capsule without significant refabrication.
At the worst, rebuilding a booster could save materials costs only, but if you consider the cost of testing, it could eliminate any savings on materials. If you have to image an entire tank for cracks, for example, it can cost more than the tank. If you've seen the fairing imager in Hawthorne (I got a tour in 2015), that's obviously a time-consuming and expensive operation, even though it's entirely automated.
I'm not saying that they can't achieve a significant cost decrease, just that it's too soon for them to have proven that they can consistently reuse boosters without too much refurbishment expense and without mission failures. We'll know much better in a year or so, and they might be able to compellingly demonstrate a savings within two years. That's just based on the number or reuse missions they can fly in that time.
You are discounting the technology that NASA has transferred. It's not just that someone has done something before, it's that they have the full set of research and development documents available to companies like SpaceX.
SpaceX is still entirely dependent on NASA for its existence today, because the money made from commercial satellite launches doesn't meet its burn rate.
NASA has funded more than just the ride at commercial-satellite prices. Consider the funding that we know about:
$278M seed funding to develop the Falcon 9 from the COTS program
The CRS program includes substantial development funding. If you break down the total cost, it comes to well over $600M/flight, 4 times what SpaceX charges for a satellite launch.
Then we have over 3 Billion to develop and fly Dragon 2.
There is also the fact that NASA (and its very close partner the Air Force) own all of the working ground facilities SpaceX is using and the Eastern and Western ranges. SpaceX won't have its own launch site for years and it's not clear that SpaceX is building the tracking stations for its own range.
When you talk about burning investor dollars, you're forgetting to consider SpaceX's fixed costs, which are huge. If they just had the cost of the rocket, they might well be profitable. But SpaceX has over 6000 employees now, with all of the facilities to support them, all of the ground support infrastructure, expensive leases, etc. If you only consider the salaries that many people would have, there is no way that income from rocket launches so far would keep up with it.
I think the present burn rate is at least USD$1 Billion per year.
Now, can reusable rockets be profitable? Probably eventually. It's not sinking the research cost, but getting the refurbishment cost close to zero. The Block 4 booster is supposed to have a longer lifetime, and that's not flown yet, so that is one of the things we are waiting to see. Block 3 boosters are good for 4 flights maximum, sometimes less.
And they haven't let us see the refurbishment of the boosters at all, so we don't know how severe it was.
I think SpaceX also told a fib about the reuse of the spacecraft on CRS-11. The CRS-4 spacecraft had a salt-water dip and wasn't going to fly again without a lot of rebuilding. I think it would be more realistic to say only the pressure vessel was reused, and the CRS-4 spacecraft was stripped to the pressure vessel and then rebuilt as if it were a new spacecraft.
Actually, rocket experts all did know that you could land a rocket on its tail. After all, the lunar module landed that way. What they did not know is whether you can re-fly a booster at a net cost savings over just building a new one. And although SpaceX has proven that they can re-fly the booster, it will take some years of operation to actually show that they save money this way.
I think they'll do it. But we've got to be realistic and realize that it's not done yet.
Sloot wasn't the only "Compression Tweak". This is someone who has compression "ideas" but can never get the product working. There was one in the US who wrote me for a long time in the 90's. One thing I remember is that he dropped hints about encoding data in the spaces in between bits. Of course this makes zero sense.
No different than whichever government's fiat money you are currently using.
I agree. Dollars are a useful fiction, but there's not really any reason that they will continue to be valuable. Especially with the rolling cluster-f**k the U.S. government has become at the moment.
Keeping most of it out of circulation raises the value of the rest, simply because the amount in the market doesn't satisfy demand.
Now, consider why my house is worth $1M. I paid a lot less than that. Combine high demand for homes near jobs in Silicon Valley with an essentially infinite supply of credit with which to buy them.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with using the Founder's Copyright is that Public Domain is not more free for the aggregate of all people than the GPL would be. It's just an invitation to integrate the public code into private works without returning anything, while the GPL promotes that more code is shared.
Right. Nobody and their legal counsel want to talk about this without an NDA. I am taking on some liability by accepting an NDA and still doing the whole thing for free.
That's your right. Of course, this matters more if you've actually released anything under it.
I should tell you, though, I have had more than one person who used gift-style licenses come crying to me about how badly they were abused. Some decide the GPL is a better idea too late...
Actually, the GPL and a trademark registration will keep just what you're talking about from happening. Going proprietary won't give you any more protection unless you're talking about just locking up the source. But you have to enforce once in a while to keep idiots from breaking the rules.
They don't want to play well with others. They should base on BSD or make their own kernel. No legal issues if they did that.
Whoa! Aren't you talking about the most successful strategy for developing a kernel ever? There seem to be no shortage of developers of high competence working on the Linux kernel, including those supported by companies. Hey, we even got Microsoft to do it after their earlier and widely publicized GPL paranoia.
I seriously doubt any kernel team, no matter the budget, can come close to what has been done with Linux.
Bill,
Debian would have the previous version before this licensing problem came up.
I am not the plaintiff in any theoretical case, and in any case am not interested in suing Debian. That's not me. But this should be a wake-up call to Debian.
Regarding CDDL vs. GPL, Sun quite deliberately applied that license and refused to dual-license. One would imagine they had Linux in mind when that decision was made. Oracle continues that. It doesn't seem that anyone on the Linux side started that fight. And given the decision in Oracle v. Google that copyright can pass across APIs, at Oracle's behest, it does not seem to me that CDDL-GPL combinations are legally safe even if you dynamically link.
Dear AC,
If that's really their intent, they're confused. Or maybe you don't understand? The GPL doesn't have anything to do with trademarks. And Grsecurity did not bother to create a trademark for their product that was different from the versions with the old GPL-only terms, which are still in use. If trademark was the problem, they'd need to create a new one for their commercial product.
This, unfortunately, would not mitigate the GPL issue, which is copyright and contract related.
You should read the entire statement, because there are things missing from the quote above that are important. The most important part is the legal theory:
Also, this is important to keep me in compliance with the law:
It's important to consider the goals of the GPL. You get great Free Software, but it's not a gift. It is sharing with rules that must be followed. You are required to keep it Free. And one of the implied purposes of the GPL is to cause more great Free Software to be made. This means that derivative works that are not shared really go against the purpose as well as the wording of the GPL.
That's the point. It's not about the kernel. User's don't see kernels at all, don't care about them. Blackberry certainly learned that lesson. All they spent on QNX and the customers yawned.
The point of having them build on Linux was that rather than investing in kernel development, they could move all of that money to things that mattered to the user experience.
I think around the time I got to HP they had just done a Billion dollar investment in new development of HP/UX. IBM in contrast de-emphasized AIX in favor of Linux, understanding the economics better than HP did. Not that this was HP's only problem.
GMO and Organic are not a dichotomy.
Solving the problem of adequate nutrition for an ever-rising population will still result in Malthusian catastrophe. At some point, no amount of science will be able to feed the number of mouths with the available resources, and of course nature will step in to make the demise sudden with some natural disaster or global-warming-induced disaster.
Evangelize ZPG, it's really our only hope.
I consulted briefly for Palm, doing an Open Source training that literally nobody who was invited was interested in hearing. I think they mostly invited the wrong folks. People were really angry that I did things like use examples, rather than just stating the point so that they could get out of there. I usually get good feedback on trainings.
One of their largest problems was that they were unwilling to abandon the 250,000 applications that they stated were built for their original Motorola 68000 architecture. So, when they came out with an ARM-based Palm, that ARM ran a 68000 emulator, and their entire operating system ran in the emulator along with all apps. So, it was obvious this company wasn't agile enough to keep up with new technology.
Of course, I suggested that they base on Linux and build their APIs on top of it. But then, I suggested this to Symbian, too, and they listened just as well - which was not at all. All of those folks thought they had some sort of magic in their kernel and invested unspeakable amounts of money in it. In Palm's case, they had a shared memory architecture that they felt would be difficult to implement on Linux.
Eventually, one of their business successors took on Linux, but way to late to salvage the business.
Falcon 9 can now carry loads originally manifested for Falcon 9 Heavy, albeit in expendable mode. It is competitive with Delta for many of the same missions.
Well, it was reassuring that the Bulgariasat booster has been refurbished at KSC. No trip to McGregor or Hawthorne. So, not interfering with new booster manufacture and probably not work as intensive as the first one.
Where did you find that statement "capsule largely assembled from previously flown components"? That is probably an accurate statement. But what we've been hearing in the news has been much less qualified, mostly sounding as if they'd reflown the capsule without significant refabrication.
At the worst, rebuilding a booster could save materials costs only, but if you consider the cost of testing, it could eliminate any savings on materials. If you have to image an entire tank for cracks, for example, it can cost more than the tank. If you've seen the fairing imager in Hawthorne (I got a tour in 2015), that's obviously a time-consuming and expensive operation, even though it's entirely automated.
I'm not saying that they can't achieve a significant cost decrease, just that it's too soon for them to have proven that they can consistently reuse boosters without too much refurbishment expense and without mission failures. We'll know much better in a year or so, and they might be able to compellingly demonstrate a savings within two years. That's just based on the number or reuse missions they can fly in that time.
You are discounting the technology that NASA has transferred. It's not just that someone has done something before, it's that they have the full set of research and development documents available to companies like SpaceX.
SpaceX is still entirely dependent on NASA for its existence today, because the money made from commercial satellite launches doesn't meet its burn rate.
NASA has funded more than just the ride at commercial-satellite prices. Consider the funding that we know about:
The CRS program includes substantial development funding. If you break down the total cost, it comes to well over $600M/flight, 4 times what SpaceX charges for a satellite launch.
Then we have over 3 Billion to develop and fly Dragon 2.
There is also the fact that NASA (and its very close partner the Air Force) own all of the working ground facilities SpaceX is using and the Eastern and Western ranges. SpaceX won't have its own launch site for years and it's not clear that SpaceX is building the tracking stations for its own range.
When you talk about burning investor dollars, you're forgetting to consider SpaceX's fixed costs, which are huge. If they just had the cost of the rocket, they might well be profitable. But SpaceX has over 6000 employees now, with all of the facilities to support them, all of the ground support infrastructure, expensive leases, etc. If you only consider the salaries that many people would have, there is no way that income from rocket launches so far would keep up with it.
I think the present burn rate is at least USD$1 Billion per year.
Now, can reusable rockets be profitable? Probably eventually. It's not sinking the research cost, but getting the refurbishment cost close to zero. The Block 4 booster is supposed to have a longer lifetime, and that's not flown yet, so that is one of the things we are waiting to see. Block 3 boosters are good for 4 flights maximum, sometimes less.
And they haven't let us see the refurbishment of the boosters at all, so we don't know how severe it was.
I think SpaceX also told a fib about the reuse of the spacecraft on CRS-11. The CRS-4 spacecraft had a salt-water dip and wasn't going to fly again without a lot of rebuilding. I think it would be more realistic to say only the pressure vessel was reused, and the CRS-4 spacecraft was stripped to the pressure vessel and then rebuilt as if it were a new spacecraft.
SpaceX would not have been able to get this far without: 1) Experience built by NASA at great expense.2) Direct financial support from NASA.
It's a drone camera.
Ibi est Dominus? Mail vocem eius et non est respondendum.
Actually, rocket experts all did know that you could land a rocket on its tail. After all, the lunar module landed that way. What they did not know is whether you can re-fly a booster at a net cost savings over just building a new one. And although SpaceX has proven that they can re-fly the booster, it will take some years of operation to actually show that they save money this way.
I think they'll do it. But we've got to be realistic and realize that it's not done yet.
I find it even more comical that someone who is the result of random chance denies that fact..
Sloot wasn't the only "Compression Tweak". This is someone who has compression "ideas" but can never get the product working. There was one in the US who wrote me for a long time in the 90's. One thing I remember is that he dropped hints about encoding data in the spaces in between bits. Of course this makes zero sense.
I agree. Dollars are a useful fiction, but there's not really any reason that they will continue to be valuable. Especially with the rolling cluster-f**k the U.S. government has become at the moment.
Keeping most of it out of circulation raises the value of the rest, simply because the amount in the market doesn't satisfy demand.
Now, consider why my house is worth $1M. I paid a lot less than that. Combine high demand for homes near jobs in Silicon Valley with an essentially infinite supply of credit with which to buy them.