But the GPL doesn't exclude all dynamically-linked code from the derivative work clause (2b). That's just a convention which I suppose came from the examples in the FSF's FAQ.
However, the example (of mere aggregation) is talking about general-purpose computers. It is not reasonable to assume this example applies to all systems.
Some have the opinion that Broadcom wireless chip drivers included in the WRT54G's firmware must be open source. The reasoning seems to follow mine: the firmware is one lump and therefore a single "work", not multiple (GPL and proprietary) works aggregated.
The WRT54G is tricky because it appears that Linksys statically linked some GPL and closed code together also. However, there are some (Andrew Miklas is one) who think that even if they released all code statically linked to GPL code (which they might have done now- see Seattle Wireless's pages on hacking the WRT), that wouldn't go far enough.
Anything.... which you statically-linked to GPL code, MUST BE GPL.
What about dynamically linking to code that's contained in a cramfs in the same ROM as the closed-source code?
This isn't an artificial example. I write digital camera firmware. We'd like to use the MAD mp3 decoder library (GPL'd), so how 'bout we elf2flat it, stick it in a compressed ramdisk image in ROM, then use (a tweaked) NetBSD ld.elf_so to load it?
[note: we're planning to contact the MAD author & try to negotiate a license so we don't have to try the trick above]
the point is that linus or "the linux community" don't have the standing to decide what a "reasonable interpretation" is any more than the RIAA has the right to decide copyright law (oh look! a slashdot-clone friendly analogy!)
And the GPL also says that Linus can't extend it and still call it the GPL. That's what he's doing by making special provisions for drivers.
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June 1991
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
If his comments had only appeared in a commentary on Linux licensing on LKML, that would be one thing, but right at the top of COPYING in linux-2.6.0-test11.tar.bz2 is
NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel
services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use
of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".
Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software
Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux
kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.
Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel
is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not
v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.
You can make your own Hunchback of Notre Dame or Aladin derived story, but if you use the characters in a way similar to Disney, they might come after you on trademark dilution grounds.
Yes, but Houghton Mifflin Company, the publisher of The Wind Done Gone, won in that case.
Not really.
According to this, the injunction against publishing imposed by an Atlanta judge was overturned by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The injunction was just a quick emergency remedy to stop "damage" occurring immediately. The Mitchell estate looked like they were going to sue, but a sealed settlement was reached. H-M has to make donations & maybe they have to give the Mitchell estate some portion of profits.
It's wierd that SCO is all upset about a Unix workalike when they started their business creating a Unix workalike.
While things like NUMA might be trade secrets, the basic design of Unix, from the 1974 ACM paper by Thompson & Ritchie, through Bach's Design (which I'm reading now), Vahalia's Internals and McKusick et al.'s Design & Implementation of 4.4 BSD are methods and practices very much in the public domain of computer science. SCO can't undo what previous owners of the Unix source & design did thirty years later.
Because although installing a filesystem driver may be painful on Win98, it's one thousand times worse on solid-state electronics.
I disagree. I write firmware for digital cameras and I'm in the process of switching from SanDisk's old twist on Etc Bin Systems' RTFS to their newer twist on it that supports FAT32. The hardest part of the job is that I've decided to revise how our "imports" system works and shift build configuration from shell variables to makefile variables (for mapping platforms to collections of features).
Actually porting the code is pretty dang easy- a POSIX-like open/close/read/write API at the top adn a bdevsw-like block(s) read/write, device init/info/reset API at the bottom.
The hard part is 1) getting everyone to agree on a patent-unencumbered filesystem (though standards bodies & extensible standards for this already exist: DCF/DPOF/EXIF/PMA/etc.) 2) getting everyone to implement it
If we switch from the Mass Storage USB class to the Still Image Device Class (PTP (picture transfer protocol) over USB) then the media format will only matter when you take the card out of the camera & use a media reader.
Canon is already making this transition which is why you can "share" their cameras with Mac OS X 10.3 & take pictures by USB control.
As the camera ASICS speed up, the desire to remove the media to read out pictures will decrease. Right now, my Dazzele Hi-Speed USB 2.0 card reader kills our cameras, but that obstacle can be overcome.
but you listen to your portable MP3 player with headphones. You're probably not going to notice the difference
Why why why why do people keep saying that headphones don't show defects in reproduction????
Most headphones don't have a frequency response that reaches as low as some speakers, but the artifacts of lossy CODECs pushed too far (too low a bitrate for too challenging material) are mostly in the higher octaves. Swirl, warble and pre-echo don't need bass response to be obvious.
The distortion of cheap headphones (when not overdriven) isn't even that obvious. The sound isn't as "good" as with better headphones, but it doesn't jump out like lossy artifacts. It's subtle stuff (besides lack of bass mind you) like a lack of "air" or "harshness" or "flatness."
Now, earbuds in a Manhattan subway station aren't a good critical listening environment, but speakers wouldn't work there either. If the room is reasonably quiet, you're going to hear artifacts better in $2 earbuds than speakers and if the room has AC and computer fans going, fully enclosed headphones will beat speakers to death with a titanium pipe.
While I worked on pro audio equipment (I'm a firmware engineer) for four years & watched Dave Rossum test H-chips with Sennheiser elements inside over-ear hearing protectors (the "dave clark specials"), my own experience backs up the theory. Try it yourself sometime. A/B a marginal mp3 with phones & with speakers & see which shows defects better.
My last response was intended as agreement and commiseration with others who suffer from an unpopular organization scheme.
I started thinking about it, first wondering if I could find references to this "technical term." Well, nope- only two hits on Google. No papers to prove to my wife that she should let me make a mess.
However, adding organization, spatial and visual gives some good resources such as
"Contrary to unwritten workplace doctrine established at the advent of the industrial revolution, the spatial organization equation does not recognize the obligation to create a pristine, ordered workspace for the sake of third-party evaluation."
I think the first thing I'm going to do is cut up some large pieces of masonite in the garage into vertical shelf dividers so I can put paper piles into folders & toss 'em in there. More "free flowing" than the file cabinet (where stuff goes to die) or piles of folders (that never get resorted).
Maybe one of those goofy labelmakers wouldn't be such a bad idea.
"Management by Piles", and it's a valid (if not widely accepted) way of organizing things. People with good visual-spatial memories usually do quite well with this technique
Until they get married.
My wife thinks that piles are disorganized, but I have a much harder time finding things in files in drawers or boxes in a closet than in random piles that *haven't been disturbed.* I can visualize exactly which pile & how deep something is, walk over & pick it out, but if the piles get moved around, I not only can't find it, but I have a disproportionate anxiety reaction. It's like my entire world has been obliterated. If I didn't know where it was at all, I could look calmly, but if I expected it somewhere (and the two backup places due to cross-wired synapses) and it's not there, I'm hopeless.
explain just how it is that the State of California, acting through the offices of the Regents of the University of California, is NOT equal to at least ONE 900 pound gorilla?
Because the constituents of a state are more nervous about spending money (on lawyers in this case) that might have only long term or no benefits.
Boards of directors and shareholders seem to be more patient and tolerant of risk. They're trying to make money with their money. Taxpayers just want lower taxes & maybe more services.
BSD remaining free as in freedom being a benefit to California college students is a pretty abstract benefit.
or $249 for the Sound Blaster Wireless Music which is a similar "wireless DAC," but the display is on the remote.
I really wish Slim had moved in this direction because I'd much rather use their open source server than Creative's Mediasource.
I don't see well enough and rooms in my house are big enough that I won't be able to read a Squeezebox across a room, but I don't want a TV-output option (CRT warm up time, power consumption, size, home theater video routing nightmare, etc.)
The nice thing about the GPL though, is that if I release my project under the GPL, and my employer tries to take control of it, they basically get a fork of the project. The GPL'd version is out there to stay, since somebody else can legally distribute it.
I disagree.
GPL is based on copyright law. Only the copyright holder can distribute with the GPL attached.
If the work is judged a work-for-hire owned by the employer, you never had the right to GPL it. If the work is judged to be owned by the employee, the employer cannot sieze it.
As a practical matter, the employer might decide to leave the GPL fork to live on its own and ask you not to contribute anymore, but unless they change the copyright message to reflect their ownership and voluntary distribution, it's a misappropriated trade secret with lax enforcement.
Lawyers will argue that, in order to use the copyrighted firmware in the camera, you must be licensed to do so. (This is false...
In Chamberlain vs. Skylink, C. argued that the portion of the code that opened the door was protected.
Here, the code that reads out pictures could be claimed to be protected from unauthorized (non-Ritz) access by a "technological measure."
While Chamberlin lost the first round of motions, many feel like the judge copped out and that the DMCA does have such and unintended effect. We would like the Lexmark case and this one to be found for the plantiffs so the DMCA would be seen as ridiculous.
Firmware legal issues are an interesting area. There's usually no license, even a shrink-wrap one and the first sale doctrine should apply, but the code in the device is theoretically protected by copyright, including the DMCA provisions.
In the distant past, a judge ruled that object code in a chip wasn't protectable but source code was akin to a literary work and was. I think it was the videogame folks who beat that decision to death, but the whole "what is a device?" and "what is speech?" questions still bounce around. Neato.
Just don't bind their source to yours and you'll be fine in using the product. Or, you can even bind their source to yours, but don't distribute the binaries outside your "organization".
I work on digital cameras. Our CPU is MMU-less so my plan is to create something like a camera OS with the kernel & memory manager, "normal" I/O (serial, disk) and camera functions exported using something like the ARM flat twist on ELF.
I've been planning to make the buttons & LCDs UI be an "app" that runs on this & also make our tty-driven calibration tool be an app rather than an alternate build. If the shell were a dynamically-loaded library, I supposed I could use GPL'd code, but it would benefit from tighter integration with the cal. tool.
See, it's my opinion that TiVo is violating the GPL, but everyone lets 'em get away with it because they're hacker friendly. The "work" they distribute in binary form is not a settop application that runs on the Linux kernel, but a settop. Actually, they distribute their code to Sony, Philips &c, so I don't suppose they have to give me, the end user, source for anything. Maybe the GPL extends to the hardware manufacturer, who's now distributing the binary & must distribute source.
In any case, the "work" that an end user gets from us is a digital camera. Pieces of code running in it might be dynamically linked, but I don't want to test whether this is "mere aggregation" in the framer's view of collections on tape snail mailed from Cambridge, Mass.
Better yet, stop thinking like Microsoft or Linksys and contribute back to those whose work and sweat you've borrowed from, and work with the GPL.
We sell chips to Asian ODMs who make cameras for OEMs who slap a brand on 'em & push 'em through the channel. It's a secret whose chips the ODMs use and what OEMs use what ODMs. We have multiple labs at our facility so different OEMs bringing up cameras won't see each other.
You might see how openness would be hard to manage. I think if we put source code up on our website & didn't point out in big red letters what cameras it runs on, we might be OK, but if a big hacker community grows up around one of the cameras (which is exactly what Flashpoint was trying to do- very cool & too bad they didn't make it), they could get uncomfortable.
If we forked busybox but ported our world-usable improvements & fixes back, that would be cool, but we have to release the derived "work" which might include all of our source also.
BSD is a safer way for embedded systems until someone clarifies "work" and "mere aggregation."
My problem with grabbing a post-1989 ash is that I can't be sure that GPL'd code from busybox hasn't leaked over into the FreeBSD version. I don't see it as cut & dried as some other posters & I've run down the history of ash & the two ELF dynamic loaders in FreeBSD. It's pretty intertwingled.
Look at pdksh-- someone wrote it because the status of ksh was uncertain, then it turned out that maybe it was OK after all?
I got a free computer from work & started to install Debian Woody on it to make a headless box. Got frustrated with the size of this stuff compared to Slackware 0.99 where I could keep track of everything. I think I'm going to put OpenBSD on it. The investment in time learning that system is guaranteed to pay off at my day job-- I can use anything I feel like. Don't need to buy CDs as the whole thing (no XFree86) is about 150 meg. I can contribute back whatever I want and know what? I will because I want to help out but also because I get to find out if I did something really stupid that might work for me today, but is long term uncool.
Even if it means Theo calling me a fuckhead, it's worth it.
Which brings up an important question: can code be re-licensed by people other than the authors when the original license was less restrictive?
Example: Alice in Wonderland is in the public domain. Peter Zelchenko made an ebook out of it with nice typography and claims copyright on the derived work. Can I cut the text & paste it into a document of mine?
Example: the Almquist Shell (ash) seems to have been a contribution to some form of BSD Unix. It's also in busybox with a GPL at the top and a Berkeley license at the bottom.
What if Kenneth Almquist doesn't like the GPL and wants his code to be distributed that way? The BSD license pretty much says he's already given up the right to say anything, but using ash in a closed source project now gives me a funny feeling:
1) I'm worried that someone will claim ash is GPL and I must release the source. The later license doesn't affect earlier versions.
2) I have a copy of busybox source in my account. I've only looked at the docs & looked at the sources enough to figure out where they originally came from, but if there are bug fixes in the GPL'd code, they'd better not be in my ash, at least in the same form.
One more twist: the ash I have is licensed under the "Almquist Public License" which is BSD-like. The copyright message in the busybox version suggests that K.A. contributed it to Berkeley and the license for that *is* the BSD license.
If I want a later version than my 1989 one, I run the risk of hitting the part of the timeline where GPL contributions began.
Most headphone may be shitty for listening to music
(I think that a $100 pair of Sony MDR-V6 are OK if a little bright, but I know a lot of people won't accept anything but Stax or Grado)
but unfortunately, even pretty bad headphones are great for hearing artifacts due to lossy compression using psychoacoustic models. You don't need good bass or flat freq. response to hear pre-echo, warbling and poorly quantized math (which some *players* do to perfectly good encodes).
Most of the infidelity in bad headphones is poorly correlated to the signal (except for maybe clipping), so easy to ignore, but mp3 @ 128kbps artifacts can drive me *crazy* on the right kind of music.
If it was buy one song at a time, I might go for it, but I pay enough monthly subscriptions between dish, cell, dsl and netflix.
Their webpage hawks the free trial at you like crazy and hides the real price but it starts at $9.99/month for 40 downloads per month.
I'm trying to be satisfied with stuff I found through Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads and avoid supporting the dinosaurs completely. GarageBand looks promising- I can listen to RealAudio songs & "radio" at work, add the ones I like to my playlist & download 'em to my iPod at home.
Slashdot Mirror
But the GPL doesn't exclude all dynamically-linked code from the derivative work clause (2b). That's just a convention which I suppose came from the examples in the FSF's FAQ.
However, the example (of mere aggregation) is talking about general-purpose computers. It is not reasonable to assume this example applies to all systems.
Some have the opinion that Broadcom wireless chip drivers included in the WRT54G's firmware must be open source. The reasoning seems to follow mine: the firmware is one lump and therefore a single "work", not multiple (GPL and proprietary) works aggregated.
The WRT54G is tricky because it appears that Linksys statically linked some GPL and closed code together also. However, there are some (Andrew Miklas is one) who think that even if they released all code statically linked to GPL code (which they might have done now- see Seattle Wireless's pages on hacking the WRT), that wouldn't go far enough.
Anything .... which you statically-linked to GPL code, MUST BE GPL.
What about dynamically linking to code that's contained in a cramfs in the same ROM as the closed-source code?
This isn't an artificial example. I write digital camera firmware. We'd like to use the MAD mp3 decoder library (GPL'd), so how 'bout we elf2flat it, stick it in a compressed ramdisk image in ROM, then use (a tweaked) NetBSD ld.elf_so to load it?
[note: we're planning to contact the MAD author & try to negotiate a license so we don't have to try the trick above]
And the GPL also says that Linus can't extend it and still call it the GPL. That's what he's doing by making special provisions for drivers.
If his comments had only appeared in a commentary on Linux licensing on LKML, that would be one thing, but right at the top of COPYING in linux-2.6.0-test11.tar.bz2 is
I think you're confused by another copyright vs. trademark issue. Derived works can be controlled by the owner of © on the original work, but copyright eventually expires. Trademarks last as long as they are maintained.
You can make your own Hunchback of Notre Dame or Aladin derived story, but if you use the characters in a way similar to Disney, they might come after you on trademark dilution grounds.
Yes, but Houghton Mifflin Company, the publisher of The Wind Done Gone, won in that case.
Not really.
According to this, the injunction against publishing imposed by an Atlanta judge was overturned by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The injunction was just a quick emergency remedy to stop "damage" occurring immediately. The Mitchell estate looked like they were going to sue, but a sealed settlement was reached. H-M has to make donations & maybe they have to give the Mitchell estate some portion of profits.
That's hardly a victory.
they see Linux as an unauthorized form of unix.
It's wierd that SCO is all upset about a Unix workalike when they started their business creating a Unix workalike.
While things like NUMA might be trade secrets, the basic design of Unix, from the 1974 ACM paper by Thompson & Ritchie, through Bach's Design (which I'm reading now), Vahalia's Internals and McKusick et al.'s Design & Implementation of 4.4 BSD are methods and practices very much in the public domain of computer science. SCO can't undo what previous owners of the Unix source & design did thirty years later.
Digital cameras are not supposed to use filenames longer than 8.3 at all. That's set by the DCF specification from JEITA.
shoulda said...
2) getting everyone to implement it interoperably
Because although installing a filesystem driver may be painful on Win98, it's one thousand times worse on solid-state electronics.
I disagree. I write firmware for digital cameras and I'm in the process of switching from SanDisk's old twist on Etc Bin Systems' RTFS to their newer twist on it that supports FAT32. The hardest part of the job is that I've decided to revise how our "imports" system works and shift build configuration from shell variables to makefile variables (for mapping platforms to collections of features).
Actually porting the code is pretty dang easy- a POSIX-like open/close/read/write API at the top adn a bdevsw-like block(s) read/write, device init/info/reset API at the bottom.
The hard part is 1) getting everyone to agree on a patent-unencumbered filesystem (though standards bodies & extensible standards for this already exist: DCF/DPOF/EXIF/PMA/etc.) 2) getting everyone to implement it
If we switch from the Mass Storage USB class to the Still Image Device Class (PTP (picture transfer protocol) over USB) then the media format will only matter when you take the card out of the camera & use a media reader.
Canon is already making this transition which is why you can "share" their cameras with Mac OS X 10.3 & take pictures by USB control.
As the camera ASICS speed up, the desire to remove the media to read out pictures will decrease. Right now, my Dazzele Hi-Speed USB 2.0 card reader kills our cameras, but that obstacle can be overcome.
but you listen to your portable MP3 player with headphones. You're probably not going to notice the difference
Why why why why do people keep saying that headphones don't show defects in reproduction????
Most headphones don't have a frequency response that reaches as low as some speakers, but the artifacts of lossy CODECs pushed too far (too low a bitrate for too challenging material) are mostly in the higher octaves. Swirl, warble and pre-echo don't need bass response to be obvious.
The distortion of cheap headphones (when not overdriven) isn't even that obvious. The sound isn't as "good" as with better headphones, but it doesn't jump out like lossy artifacts. It's subtle stuff (besides lack of bass mind you) like a lack of "air" or "harshness" or "flatness."
Now, earbuds in a Manhattan subway station aren't a good critical listening environment, but speakers wouldn't work there either. If the room is reasonably quiet, you're going to hear artifacts better in $2 earbuds than speakers and if the room has AC and computer fans going, fully enclosed headphones will beat speakers to death with a titanium pipe.
While I worked on pro audio equipment (I'm a firmware engineer) for four years & watched Dave Rossum test H-chips with Sennheiser elements inside over-ear hearing protectors (the "dave clark specials"), my own experience backs up the theory. Try it yourself sometime. A/B a marginal mp3 with phones & with speakers & see which shows defects better.
My last response was intended as agreement and commiseration with others who suffer from an unpopular organization scheme.
I started thinking about it, first wondering if I could find references to this "technical term." Well, nope- only two hits on Google. No papers to prove to my wife that she should let me make a mess.
However, adding organization, spatial and visual gives some good resources such as
"Contrary to unwritten workplace doctrine established at the advent of the industrial revolution, the spatial organization equation does not recognize the obligation to create a pristine, ordered workspace for the sake of third-party evaluation."
I think the first thing I'm going to do is cut up some large pieces of masonite in the garage into vertical shelf dividers so I can put paper piles into folders & toss 'em in there. More "free flowing" than the file cabinet (where stuff goes to die) or piles of folders (that never get resorted).
Maybe one of those goofy labelmakers wouldn't be such a bad idea.
"Management by Piles", and it's a valid (if not widely accepted) way of organizing things. People with good visual-spatial memories usually do quite well with this technique
Until they get married.
My wife thinks that piles are disorganized, but I have a much harder time finding things in files in drawers or boxes in a closet than in random piles that *haven't been disturbed.* I can visualize exactly which pile & how deep something is, walk over & pick it out, but if the piles get moved around, I not only can't find it, but I have a disproportionate anxiety reaction. It's like my entire world has been obliterated. If I didn't know where it was at all, I could look calmly, but if I expected it somewhere (and the two backup places due to cross-wired synapses) and it's not there, I'm hopeless.
Or, briefly:
"she's tidied up and I can't FIND anything!"
http://www.fisher-price.com/us/rescueheroes/
Wendy Waters
Jack Hammer
Kenny Ride
explain just how it is that the State of California, acting through the offices of the Regents of the University of California, is NOT equal to at least ONE 900 pound gorilla?
Because the constituents of a state are more nervous about spending money (on lawyers in this case) that might have only long term or no benefits.
Boards of directors and shareholders seem to be more patient and tolerant of risk. They're trying to make money with their money. Taxpayers just want lower taxes & maybe more services.
BSD remaining free as in freedom being a benefit to California college students is a pretty abstract benefit.
hear (and see) the monkey speak
Hear (and see) the monkey talk
or $249 for the Sound Blaster Wireless Music which is a similar "wireless DAC," but the display is on the remote.
I really wish Slim had moved in this direction because I'd much rather use their open source server than Creative's Mediasource.
I don't see well enough and rooms in my house are big enough that I won't be able to read a Squeezebox across a room, but I don't want a TV-output option (CRT warm up time, power consumption, size, home theater video routing nightmare, etc.)
The nice thing about the GPL though, is that if I release my project under the GPL, and my employer tries to take control of it, they basically get a fork of the project. The GPL'd version is out there to stay, since somebody else can legally distribute it.
I disagree.
GPL is based on copyright law. Only the copyright holder can distribute with the GPL attached.
If the work is judged a work-for-hire owned by the employer, you never had the right to GPL it. If the work is judged to be owned by the employee, the employer cannot sieze it.
As a practical matter, the employer might decide to leave the GPL fork to live on its own and ask you not to contribute anymore, but unless they change the copyright message to reflect their ownership and voluntary distribution, it's a misappropriated trade secret with lax enforcement.
Also (DMCA, not NET) Dennis Rocci went to jail for selling Xbox mod chips.
Everyone knows about Skylarov getting picked up, but this seems to be another untold story of jail time for copyright convictions.
The first DMCA conviction was Thomas Michael Whitehead for selling DirectTV cracks.
Lawyers will argue that, in order to use the copyrighted firmware in the camera, you must be licensed to do so. (This is false...
In Chamberlain vs. Skylink, C. argued that the portion of the code that opened the door was protected.
Here, the code that reads out pictures could be claimed to be protected from unauthorized (non-Ritz) access by a "technological measure."
While Chamberlin lost the first round of motions, many feel like the judge copped out and that the DMCA does have such and unintended effect. We would like the Lexmark case and this one to be found for the plantiffs so the DMCA would be seen as ridiculous.
Firmware legal issues are an interesting area. There's usually no license, even a shrink-wrap one and the first sale doctrine should apply, but the code in the device is theoretically protected by copyright, including the DMCA provisions.
In the distant past, a judge ruled that object code in a chip wasn't protectable but source code was akin to a literary work and was. I think it was the videogame folks who beat that decision to death, but the whole "what is a device?" and "what is speech?" questions still bounce around. Neato.
Just don't bind their source to yours and you'll be fine in using the product. Or, you can even bind their source to yours, but don't distribute the binaries outside your "organization".
I work on digital cameras. Our CPU is MMU-less so my plan is to create something like a camera OS with the kernel & memory manager, "normal" I/O (serial, disk) and camera functions exported using something like the ARM flat twist on ELF.
I've been planning to make the buttons & LCDs UI be an "app" that runs on this & also make our tty-driven calibration tool be an app rather than an alternate build. If the shell were a dynamically-loaded library, I supposed I could use GPL'd code, but it would benefit from tighter integration with the cal. tool.
See, it's my opinion that TiVo is violating the GPL, but everyone lets 'em get away with it because they're hacker friendly. The "work" they distribute in binary form is not a settop application that runs on the Linux kernel, but a settop. Actually, they distribute their code to Sony, Philips &c, so I don't suppose they have to give me, the end user, source for anything. Maybe the GPL extends to the hardware manufacturer, who's now distributing the binary & must distribute source.
In any case, the "work" that an end user gets from us is a digital camera. Pieces of code running in it might be dynamically linked, but I don't want to test whether this is "mere aggregation" in the framer's view of collections on tape snail mailed from Cambridge, Mass.
Better yet, stop thinking like Microsoft or Linksys and contribute back to those whose work and sweat you've borrowed from, and work with the GPL.
We sell chips to Asian ODMs who make cameras for OEMs who slap a brand on 'em & push 'em through the channel. It's a secret whose chips the ODMs use and what OEMs use what ODMs. We have multiple labs at our facility so different OEMs bringing up cameras won't see each other.
You might see how openness would be hard to manage. I think if we put source code up on our website & didn't point out in big red letters what cameras it runs on, we might be OK, but if a big hacker community grows up around one of the cameras (which is exactly what Flashpoint was trying to do- very cool & too bad they didn't make it), they could get uncomfortable.
If we forked busybox but ported our world-usable improvements & fixes back, that would be cool, but we have to release the derived "work" which might include all of our source also.
BSD is a safer way for embedded systems until someone clarifies "work" and "mere aggregation."
My problem with grabbing a post-1989 ash is that I can't be sure that GPL'd code from busybox hasn't leaked over into the FreeBSD version. I don't see it as cut & dried as some other posters & I've run down the history of ash & the two ELF dynamic loaders in FreeBSD. It's pretty intertwingled.
Look at pdksh-- someone wrote it because the status of ksh was uncertain, then it turned out that maybe it was OK after all?
I got a free computer from work & started to install Debian Woody on it to make a headless box. Got frustrated with the size of this stuff compared to Slackware 0.99 where I could keep track of everything. I think I'm going to put OpenBSD on it. The investment in time learning that system is guaranteed to pay off at my day job-- I can use anything I feel like. Don't need to buy CDs as the whole thing (no XFree86) is about 150 meg. I can contribute back whatever I want and know what? I will because I want to help out but also because I get to find out if I did something really stupid that might work for me today, but is long term uncool.
Even if it means Theo calling me a fuckhead, it's worth it.
Which brings up an important question: can code be re-licensed by people other than the authors when the original license was less restrictive?
Example: Alice in Wonderland is in the public domain. Peter Zelchenko made an ebook out of it with nice typography and claims copyright on the derived work. Can I cut the text & paste it into a document of mine?
Example: the Almquist Shell (ash) seems to have been a contribution to some form of BSD Unix. It's also in busybox with a GPL at the top and a Berkeley license at the bottom.
What if Kenneth Almquist doesn't like the GPL and wants his code to be distributed that way? The BSD license pretty much says he's already given up the right to say anything, but using ash in a closed source project now gives me a funny feeling:
1) I'm worried that someone will claim ash is GPL and I must release the source. The later license doesn't affect earlier versions.
2) I have a copy of busybox source in my account. I've only looked at the docs & looked at the sources enough to figure out where they originally came from, but if there are bug fixes in the GPL'd code, they'd better not be in my ash, at least in the same form.
One more twist: the ash I have is licensed under the "Almquist Public License" which is BSD-like. The copyright message in the busybox version suggests that K.A. contributed it to Berkeley and the license for that *is* the BSD license.
If I want a later version than my 1989 one, I run the risk of hitting the part of the timeline where GPL contributions began.
Any pointers to software where you put in your longitude & latitude & it draws a star map for your location?
I'm googling in another tab, but I'm hoping for a pointer to something that actually works.
I got the azimuth & altitude figures for tonight, but I'm having a little trouble visualizing it.
Most headphones are shitty
Most headphone may be shitty for listening to music
(I think that a $100 pair of Sony MDR-V6 are OK if a little bright, but I know a lot of people won't accept anything but Stax or Grado)
but unfortunately, even pretty bad headphones are great for hearing artifacts due to lossy compression using psychoacoustic models. You don't need good bass or flat freq. response to hear pre-echo, warbling and poorly quantized math (which some *players* do to perfectly good encodes).
Most of the infidelity in bad headphones is poorly correlated to the signal (except for maybe clipping), so easy to ignore, but mp3 @ 128kbps artifacts can drive me *crazy* on the right kind of music.
emusic.com
If it was buy one song at a time, I might go for it, but I pay enough monthly subscriptions between dish, cell, dsl and netflix.
Their webpage hawks the free trial at you like crazy and hides the real price but it starts at $9.99/month for 40 downloads per month.
I'm trying to be satisfied with stuff I found through Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads and avoid supporting the dinosaurs completely. GarageBand looks promising- I can listen to RealAudio songs & "radio" at work, add the ones I like to my playlist & download 'em to my iPod at home.