They've known about legOS for at least 30 months (go search for 'Noga' and 'Lego' on Wired) and haven't breathed a peep about infringement until now. So... I'm not sure what the equivalent of a statute of limitations would be for something like this but they've already let it go for a long time.
Lego should have protected it 30 months ago, when they told Wired they though it was great that people were doing this. Since then, legOS has enabled thousands of serious programmers (including several large universities) to buy and use Mindstorms when they wouldn't have put down their money otherwise. It's a serious slap in the face of people who have made a lot of money for Lego and are now getting stabbed in the back.
1) This exact article was done by Forbes 2 years ago. At that time, Lego was very happy to have Markus and other folks hacking on legOS. If anyone can find a 'free' link to that article, I'd appreciate it, but the Forbes archives are not open so I can't link to it. Sources of amusement: that Business 2.0 feels that this is original or interesting writing.
2) The article (and Lego, apparently) act as if Markus still maintains legOS. He hasn't committed to legOS CVS or spoken to the mailing lists in over 18 months (last post to lugnet was in March 2000.) He also doesn't maintain the 'official' website anymore- the one on noga.de hasn't been updated in a similar length of time and has been supplanted as the canonical reference for legOS by legOS.sourceforge.net.
3) Lego has known about legOS since at least Feb. of 1999, when their PR people told Wired that "'People have also done stuff [created programming tools and components like LegOS] on their own as well, and that's fine,' Dion said." For them to change their minds now, more than 30 months later, is pretty low. I can't afford to fight it (I'm the defacto maintainer of legOS and coordinated the last release) but I'm fairly certain that a decent copyright lawyer could demonstrate that 30 months of knowledge and lack of action over a supposed violation makes the violation non-actionable.
Anyway... I'm not Markus, so I can't really answer questions about this. But I can say that this whole episode is pretty disgusting. I hope Lego will come forward and clear the air, and soon.
1) noga.de is no longer maintained; legos.sourceforge.net is the canonical site now.
2) For a complete reference of all available free alternatives for Mindstorms on Linux, check the Lego Mini-HOWTO at the LDP. For more details on legOS and Forth (two of the most mature alternatives) check out Extreme Mindstorms. [shameless plugs, both]
3) There is, of yet, no way to run legOS or most of the other alternative environments on Mindstorms 2.0 from Linux because there are, ATM, no tools to control the USB towers that are standard with 2.0.
Thanks...
Luis Villa (legOS maintainer)
Yeah. Because blue boxes and 'no one ever got fired for buying IBM' helped OS/2 soooo much...;)
Re:Where will palm support be announced?
on
Evolution Bug-Hunt!
·
· Score: 2
Red Carpet, and evolution@ximian.com. Not sure about other locations- I'm sure it'll be some place on the web site but I don't know any details about where.
Mozilla and Eazel have both done similar things; we're certainly inspired by their efforts.
Re:most bugs reported so far?
on
Evolution Bug-Hunt!
·
· Score: 3, Informative
A rudimentary contributor report. This is not exactly the report that will be used for the prizes (this one doesn't adjust by date, dups, or a couple other factors) but it does give a ballpark idea of where people stand. Remember we'll also be giving out some stuff to people who find and mark dups, not just adding new bugs to the DB.
Hey! So... I guess I'm going to have a busy day tomorrow:) If you really want to get a good start and be helpful, I'd recommend that you read the Bug Day TODO list before coming by the bug day. We need lots of help- but we also need people who are going to be willing to get their hands dirty in the bugzilla, not just sit in the channel and ask when their pet bug will be fixed.
So... hope to see you all tomorrow, and hope that you'll be willing to help out in a constructive manner!
Luis Villa
Ximian Bugmaster
P.S. I'll be reading responses, so if you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Thanks!
...but every kid I've ever seen play with a Mindstorm has had their ideas of play changed. It's an awesome product that stretches the imaginations of kids and adults alike, in much the same way Lego Space did for me when I was younger. True, it hasn't had the commercial success of past Lego products. But I don't think post-MTV generation kids/want/ toys like that- so whether or not Lego builds products that do that is irrelevant to market success. What is relevant (at least to the thrust of the article) is that they are still building such products. People just aren't buying them.
What else does Linux have that I'm missing?
Stability? The single most unstable box I've ever had to use was Solaris x86. Going to specific web pages that were _all_ _text_ in Netscape could reliably, repeatably 100% crash X. It would often fail to reboot, just looping in circles, shutting down and rebooting over and over again. I realize Solaris for sparc is a solid, mature OS- but Solaris x86 has a long, long way before it is as stable as... say... Windows 3.1.
Depends a lot on where you are. My SO is, in fact, out in Niger more or less digging furrows and planting trees. Peace Corps is an incredibly varied group; they do have people wiring villages in many parts of the world but in others they work hard at very, very simple things like farming.
Look into the Peace Corps again, and make sure to talk with someone with the latest information. They have IT projects in the Carribean and Eastern Europe.
If you are using potato, you can grab what is effectively an RC beta (1.0.91) from ftp.ximian.com/pub/evolution/your_distro_here/ The more it gets tested, the better the next RC release will be.
[Disclosure: I'm the Ximian Bugmaster.]
So... I happen to be home and (for once) have access to a windows box and QT. If you haven't already re-installed windows, do it. That video is incredible, especially the "hand drawn" Q3. Damn.
No. If all major websites start using Hailstorm to "make the buying experience easier", MS gets a cut of every purchase. Sales of servers and such is miniscule compared to what that could be, especially when (as the other poster has noted) MS can tie the desktop into Hailstorm.
More or less, but if Hailstorm (which is a huge threat to personal control of information, IMHO) is part of.Net, then my (admittedly poor) logic training suggest that that makes.Net a huge threat to personal control of information. I'm also not entirely sure that your characterization of Hailstorm as "one tiny piece" of.NET is correct. Hailstorm is how MS is going to make their money off of.NET- which means that, as much as they want to downplay it right now, it will become the most important part of.NET in the long term.
The thing is that MS intends for those tools to give developers easy ways to connect to and use MS services. So, say, if you build your site with.Net libraries/servers, you could make it such that all people who have registered with MS have the equivalent of Amazon's one click shopping at any site that uses.Net. (I'm just pulling this example out of my ass, but you get the point.)
.Net has been, from day one, about far more than C#- it has been about integrating the entire Web with the desktop (which is a noble goal) and specifically with the MS desktop (not so noble.) So don't limit yourself to thinking "this will help people build web sites, so what does AOL have to worry about." Think ".Net will help people build apps that use the internet but bypass the web (and AOL) completely, and use MS servers and services instead of their own." And that is the kind of thing that AOL is worried about.
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They've known about legOS for at least 30 months (go search for 'Noga' and 'Lego' on Wired) and haven't breathed a peep about infringement until now. So... I'm not sure what the equivalent of a statute of limitations would be for something like this but they've already let it go for a long time.
Lego should have protected it 30 months ago, when they told Wired they though it was great that people were doing this. Since then, legOS has enabled thousands of serious programmers (including several large universities) to buy and use Mindstorms when they wouldn't have put down their money otherwise. It's a serious slap in the face of people who have made a lot of money for Lego and are now getting stabbed in the back.
1) This exact article was done by Forbes 2 years ago. At that time, Lego was very happy to have Markus and other folks hacking on legOS. If anyone can find a 'free' link to that article, I'd appreciate it, but the Forbes archives are not open so I can't link to it. Sources of amusement: that Business 2.0 feels that this is original or interesting writing.
2) The article (and Lego, apparently) act as if Markus still maintains legOS. He hasn't committed to legOS CVS or spoken to the mailing lists in over 18 months (last post to lugnet was in March 2000.) He also doesn't maintain the 'official' website anymore- the one on noga.de hasn't been updated in a similar length of time and has been supplanted as the canonical reference for legOS by legOS.sourceforge.net.
3) Lego has known about legOS since at least Feb. of 1999, when their PR people told Wired that "'People have also done stuff [created programming tools and components like LegOS] on their own as well, and that's fine,' Dion said." For them to change their minds now, more than 30 months later, is pretty low. I can't afford to fight it (I'm the defacto maintainer of legOS and coordinated the last release) but I'm fairly certain that a decent copyright lawyer could demonstrate that 30 months of knowledge and lack of action over a supposed violation makes the violation non-actionable.
Anyway... I'm not Markus, so I can't really answer questions about this. But I can say that this whole episode is pretty disgusting. I hope Lego will come forward and clear the air, and soon.
And we'll have Oprah and Senator Liebermann calling for a ban on applets for a few months afterword. ;)
Would that be such a bad thing?
1) noga.de is no longer maintained; legos.sourceforge.net is the canonical site now.
2) For a complete reference of all available free alternatives for Mindstorms on Linux, check the Lego Mini-HOWTO at the LDP. For more details on legOS and Forth (two of the most mature alternatives) check out Extreme Mindstorms. [shameless plugs, both]
3) There is, of yet, no way to run legOS or most of the other alternative environments on Mindstorms 2.0 from Linux because there are, ATM, no tools to control the USB towers that are standard with 2.0.
Thanks...
Luis Villa (legOS maintainer)
Yeah. Because blue boxes and 'no one ever got fired for buying IBM' helped OS/2 soooo much... ;)
Red Carpet, and evolution@ximian.com. Not sure about other locations- I'm sure it'll be some place on the web site but I don't know any details about where.
Very rudimentary S/MIME support is in the code, but it won't be complete (or probably even enabled) for 1.0.
Mozilla and Eazel have both done similar things; we're certainly inspired by their efforts.
A rudimentary contributor report. This is not exactly the report that will be used for the prizes (this one doesn't adjust by date, dups, or a couple other factors) but it does give a ballpark idea of where people stand. Remember we'll also be giving out some stuff to people who find and mark dups, not just adding new bugs to the DB.
Palm Sync will be in the packaged binaries soon; hopefully next week.
Actually, the version on the CD is 0.11.
Hey! So... I guess I'm going to have a busy day tomorrow :) If you really want to get a good start and be helpful, I'd recommend that you read the Bug Day TODO list before coming by the bug day. We need lots of help- but we also need people who are going to be willing to get their hands dirty in the bugzilla, not just sit in the channel and ask when their pet bug will be fixed.
So... hope to see you all tomorrow, and hope that you'll be willing to help out in a constructive manner!
Luis Villa
Ximian Bugmaster
P.S. I'll be reading responses, so if you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Thanks!
...but every kid I've ever seen play with a Mindstorm has had their ideas of play changed. It's an awesome product that stretches the imaginations of kids and adults alike, in much the same way Lego Space did for me when I was younger. True, it hasn't had the commercial success of past Lego products. But I don't think post-MTV generation kids /want/ toys like that- so whether or not Lego builds products that do that is irrelevant to market success. What is relevant (at least to the thrust of the article) is that they are still building such products. People just aren't buying them.
What else does Linux have that I'm missing?
Stability? The single most unstable box I've ever had to use was Solaris x86. Going to specific web pages that were _all_ _text_ in Netscape could reliably, repeatably 100% crash X. It would often fail to reboot, just looping in circles, shutting down and rebooting over and over again. I realize Solaris for sparc is a solid, mature OS- but Solaris x86 has a long, long way before it is as stable as... say... Windows 3.1.
Hrm. They were talking them up at their recruitment booth at Duke in January... too bad if they really are vapor.
Or... wiring villages? PC does it. Like I said in my other comment, PC does /everything/- from the very purely techie to very, very manual labor.
Depends a lot on where you are. My SO is, in fact, out in Niger more or less digging furrows and planting trees. Peace Corps is an incredibly varied group; they do have people wiring villages in many parts of the world but in others they work hard at very, very simple things like farming.
Look into the Peace Corps again, and make sure to talk with someone with the latest information. They have IT projects in the Carribean and Eastern Europe.
I can't find a link ATM, but I know the real Peace Corps now has IT programs in the Carribean and Eastern Europe.
If you are using potato, you can grab what is effectively an RC beta (1.0.91) from ftp.ximian.com/pub/evolution/your_distro_here/ The more it gets tested, the better the next RC release will be. [Disclosure: I'm the Ximian Bugmaster.]
So... I happen to be home and (for once) have access to a windows box and QT. If you haven't already re-installed windows, do it. That video is incredible, especially the "hand drawn" Q3. Damn.
No. If all major websites start using Hailstorm to "make the buying experience easier", MS gets a cut of every purchase. Sales of servers and such is miniscule compared to what that could be, especially when (as the other poster has noted) MS can tie the desktop into Hailstorm.
More or less, but if Hailstorm (which is a huge threat to personal control of information, IMHO) is part of .Net, then my (admittedly poor) logic training suggest that that makes .Net a huge threat to personal control of information. I'm also not entirely sure that your characterization of Hailstorm as "one tiny piece" of .NET is correct. Hailstorm is how MS is going to make their money off of .NET- which means that, as much as they want to downplay it right now, it will become the most important part of .NET in the long term.
The thing is that MS intends for those tools to give developers easy ways to connect to and use MS services. So, say, if you build your site with .Net libraries/servers, you could make it such that all people who have registered with MS have the equivalent of Amazon's one click shopping at any site that uses .Net. (I'm just pulling this example out of my ass, but you get the point.)
.Net has been, from day one, about far more than C#- it has been about integrating the entire Web with the desktop (which is a noble goal) and specifically with the MS desktop (not so noble.) So don't limit yourself to thinking "this will help people build web sites, so what does AOL have to worry about." Think ".Net will help people build apps that use the internet but bypass the web (and AOL) completely, and use MS servers and services instead of their own." And that is the kind of thing that AOL is worried about.