It's time to talk about "free software"... *again*
on
QNX "Opens" Source Code
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The title of the press release is "QNX Publishes Neutrino Source Code and Opens Development Process". Arista, on the other hand, didn't seem to mind mangling this in order to get this article posted to Slashdot.
Ever watch Revolution OS? At some conference (I think it was either LinuxWorld or O'Reilly) RMS was in the middle of giving a speech, and Linus started chasing his kid around the stage directly behind RMS. RMS, on the other hand, was polite, smiled, and continued his speech without even flinching.
And don't even get me started on all the times where Linus talks about himself as the "practical" one, even though he doesn't seem to care enough about practical issues like copyright law to actually bother to learn something about them (or to consult a lawyer) before blabbering to the media. (The way Linus labels legal issues as "unimportant" smells more like idealism than pragmatism to me...)
In my opinion, RMS has the physical appearance of a hippie-zealot, and Linus takes advantage of that to mislead people who don't know better. I think RMS has every right to complain.
From what I can tell in many ways Torvalds stays with GPLv2 because it offers a compromise between openess of source code and a license that businesses can tolerate.
It's not about "openness of source code". It's about the freedom to run your business as you see fit, without having to bend to the will of the vendors of the software that you happen to be using. The only businesses that need to "tolerate" the GPL are ones who fancy themselves vendors of mass-market proprietary software, or ones who are doing something illegal (e.g. patent infringement, trojan horses, etc.) and want to avoid getting caught.
RMS has his goals and aspirations, and is also somewhat of extremist in his ideals, IMHO, where compromise is not in the vocabulary.
Compromise is not in RMS's vocabulary? Are you on crack? What do you think the LGPL, the "system libraries" clause of the GPL, and the "cover texts"/"invariant sections" of the GFDL are all about? RMS is willing to compromise tactically in order to win strategically.
Why don't you actually go read the FSF website, instead of basing your opinion of RMS on what others have written?
I don't buy it. GPLv3 5c says:
c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this
License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This
License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7
additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts,
regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no
permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not
invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.
So you'd need to provide Complete Corresponding Source Code for the hypervisor and the codec, including any keys you need to make a modified hypervisor/codec work on the hardware.
Section 5 further says:
A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent
works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work,
and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program,
in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an
"aggregate" if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not
used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users
beyond what the individual works permit.
Why mightn't the courts look at the entire chunk of hypervisor-TiVo "firmware" as a single "larger program"?
As Cindy Cohn allegedly said, "you can't hack the law".
The GPL doesn't say anything about hypervisors, so its quite possible for TiVO to run their UI in a virtualized environment, with the hypervisor monitoring the application and locking out the user if any modifications are made.
"Installation Information" for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.
I want an operating system, not a political movement.
Richard Stallman didn't want a political movement either. He wanted to work around a flaky printer. Unfortunately, reality can be such that a political movement is necessary in order to obtain the things that many of us think should be able to be taken for granted.
Will "Go buy new hardware, n00b" be the successor to "RTFM?"
It's no different than buying a PC from Dell and then expecting to be able to run Mac OS X on it. If you want to run certain software, you have to buy hardware that it's compatible with.
"WinTVs with encoders"? As in that Hauppauge crap? (Seriously - all the software of theirs I've used sucks in various interesting and annoying ways. Windows MCE is OK though, if limited and hard to get hold of.)
Who uses Hauppauge's Windows software, anyway? The point of buying a Hauppauge card is to use it under a free operating system, not under Windows. (Which is why I'm always amused by the name "WinTV" that they gave their cards.)
They are already at the "Break Even" point, now the cost will go down, because they are setup as a not for profit. If they MAKE a profit, there are charges and fees they will have to pay.
Being a not-for-profit or a non-profit organization doesn't mean you have to operate at a loss. You just can't pay your profits as dividends to your shareholders.
This sort of thing is exactly why I think (brace yourselves, everyone) that all science outside of pure maths should abandon "laws." Not the rules themselves, just the notion that they are %100 pure-real-deal.
Science already doesn't work that way. I suggest you do some reading.
Some more quick reading (or searching with Google) will make you realize that this is just the latest way that the nvidia drivers come far from the characterization of "just works". There are other examples, like trying to get them to work at all under Xen.
Or you could put your money where your mouth is and support the Open Graphics Project. If this gets off the ground, the other manufacturers might wake up.
I'm talking about the fact that the probability that there are privilege escalation holes on any given system approaches 1, because the interface between unprivileged and privileged code isn't generally auditable.
There's still way too much code that runs with elevated privileges. I want to be able to run downright *malicious* code on my machine, under X11, and not be worried about it compromising my SSH keys, for example.
If this doesn't happen, we're eventually going to see the malicious screensavers in Linux that we've in Windows throughout the last decade.
The problem is that "Linux"[1] is not a single operating system, and there are subtle binary incompatibilities between various distros. Use Debian for a while, then switch to something like Mandriva. You'll get the idea pretty quickly.
First of all, as another posted pointed out, the GPL hasn't been tested in a US court
It depends on what you mean by "tested". It was most definitely at issue in Daniel Wallace v. Free Software Foundation, Inc., where the plaintiff sued the FSF for anticompetitive price fixing (and lost, and had to pay court costs.).
If I recall correctly, the GPL was also at issue in one or more of the SCO cases, though I don't know whether the court ever ruled on it.
Slashdot Mirror
The title of the press release is "QNX Publishes Neutrino Source Code and Opens Development Process". Arista, on the other hand, didn't seem to mind mangling this in order to get this article posted to Slashdot.
I imagine this kind of thing might be why Bruce Perens said way back in 1999 that it's time to talk about "free software" again.
Ever watch Revolution OS? At some conference (I think it was either LinuxWorld or O'Reilly) RMS was in the middle of giving a speech, and Linus started chasing his kid around the stage directly behind RMS. RMS, on the other hand, was polite, smiled, and continued his speech without even flinching.
And don't even get me started on all the times where Linus talks about himself as the "practical" one, even though he doesn't seem to care enough about practical issues like copyright law to actually bother to learn something about them (or to consult a lawyer) before blabbering to the media. (The way Linus labels legal issues as "unimportant" smells more like idealism than pragmatism to me...)
In my opinion, RMS has the physical appearance of a hippie-zealot, and Linus takes advantage of that to mislead people who don't know better. I think RMS has every right to complain.
It's not about "openness of source code". It's about the freedom to run your business as you see fit, without having to bend to the will of the vendors of the software that you happen to be using. The only businesses that need to "tolerate" the GPL are ones who fancy themselves vendors of mass-market proprietary software, or ones who are doing something illegal (e.g. patent infringement, trojan horses, etc.) and want to avoid getting caught.
RMS has his goals and aspirations, and is also somewhat of extremist in his ideals, IMHO, where compromise is not in the vocabulary.Compromise is not in RMS's vocabulary? Are you on crack? What do you think the LGPL, the "system libraries" clause of the GPL, and the "cover texts"/"invariant sections" of the GFDL are all about? RMS is willing to compromise tactically in order to win strategically.
Why don't you actually go read the FSF website, instead of basing your opinion of RMS on what others have written?
So you'd need to provide Complete Corresponding Source Code for the hypervisor and the codec, including any keys you need to make a modified hypervisor/codec work on the hardware.
Section 5 further says:
A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit.Why mightn't the courts look at the entire chunk of hypervisor-TiVo "firmware" as a single "larger program"?
As Cindy Cohn allegedly said, "you can't hack the law".
"Don't let this happen to your customers."
...
[Windows black screen of death]
Free software means freedom.
(Logos:) [FSF] [FSFE] [FFII] [OpenBSD] [Apache]
From GPLv3:
"Installation Information" for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.Why would a hypervisor be excluded from this?
Richard Stallman didn't want a political movement either. He wanted to work around a flaky printer. Unfortunately, reality can be such that a political movement is necessary in order to obtain the things that many of us think should be able to be taken for granted.
It's no different than buying a PC from Dell and then expecting to be able to run Mac OS X on it. If you want to run certain software, you have to buy hardware that it's compatible with.
In other words, no executing a denial-of-service attack against their service?
Who uses Hauppauge's Windows software, anyway? The point of buying a Hauppauge card is to use it under a free operating system, not under Windows. (Which is why I'm always amused by the name "WinTV" that they gave their cards.)
Being a not-for-profit or a non-profit organization doesn't mean you have to operate at a loss. You just can't pay your profits as dividends to your shareholders.
Science already doesn't work that way. I suggest you do some reading.
Some more quick reading (or searching with Google) will make you realize that this is just the latest way that the nvidia drivers come far from the characterization of "just works". There are other examples, like trying to get them to work at all under Xen.
Or you could put your money where your mouth is and support the Open Graphics Project. If this gets off the ground, the other manufacturers might wake up.
Right...
Uh, because the driver's authors can't anticipate all the ways in which people might want to use it?
Nvidia's binary blob driver doesn't work with Xen, so I can't use Xen on my desktop, and it'll only ever get fixed if Nvidia gets around to it.
"F*ck Islam" by itself isn't hate speech. Is there something more to the group than that?
I'm talking about the fact that the probability that there are privilege escalation holes on any given system approaches 1, because the interface between unprivileged and privileged code isn't generally auditable.
... not to be confused with Adi Shamir (the cryptographer).
There's still way too much code that runs with elevated privileges. I want to be able to run downright *malicious* code on my machine, under X11, and not be worried about it compromising my SSH keys, for example.
If this doesn't happen, we're eventually going to see the malicious screensavers in Linux that we've in Windows throughout the last decade.
The problem is that "Linux"[1] is not a single operating system, and there are subtle binary incompatibilities between various distros. Use Debian for a while, then switch to something like Mandriva. You'll get the idea pretty quickly.
-
[1] or "GNU/Linux"---it doesn't matter here
Install Debian? Install anything that's been released within the last 2 years?
libvorbis and libtheora are trivial? Please.
Replace "inanimate software deserves" with "users deserve", and you might have an accurate characterization of what so-called "GPL trolls" believe.
It depends on what you mean by "tested". It was most definitely at issue in Daniel Wallace v. Free Software Foundation, Inc., where the plaintiff sued the FSF for anticompetitive price fixing (and lost, and had to pay court costs.).
If I recall correctly, the GPL was also at issue in one or more of the SCO cases, though I don't know whether the court ever ruled on it.