Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario | From | Bernd Petrovitsch <> | Date | Wed, 14 Dec 2005 10:14:18 +0100 |
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On Wed, 2005-12-14 at 09:59 +0100, Helge Hafting wrote: > Bernd Petrovitsch wrote: > >On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 09:25 +0100, Helge Hafting wrote: > > > > > >>Salyzyn, Mark wrote: [...] > >>Uh, a copyrighted standard? They are trying to live up to a secret > >>standard, one they cannot publish? > >>Don't sound like a standard to me - a standard is something known, > >>that is the purpose of standardization. > >>This sounds like "we standardized the voltage for household lamps, but > >>we won't tell if it is 110V, 220V or something completely different." > >>I really hope I misunderstood this. > > > >s/copyright/patent/ then you will get it probably more right. > >Given (beautiful and readable) source code, a patent infringement is > >probably much easier to proove than with disassembled output of gcc-4.x. > > > Oh. So they are infringing already, and just trying to hide it?
ACK - there are so many patents out there (where many them are granted for software as such, trivial, prior art and/or combinations of them)
> This is so common that it applies to most drivers? :-(
ACK. But this fact is probably not be present in the mind of the average (none-techie) beancounter, manager or decider.
> >>Standards compliance should never get in the way of open source. > >>Sure - if the owner modifies the source, then the thing may no longer > >>comply with the standard. In some cases even illegal or dangerous. > > > >Propriatory vendors (the larger they are, the more it makes sense) do > >that all the time without telling their customers/users (usually > >somewhere hidden within some tools which produce not compliant garbage) > >and the strategy is called "customer lockin". > > > Closed source may lock customers out, not in. I don't see how an
Yes, also. But I was here refering to software in general, e.g. the excess of the browser war in creating new HTML entities which were silently used by the own "WYSIWYG-HTML-Editor" (as if such could exist - not even in theory).
> open source driver makes it easier for the customer to get away > from the product. If the proprietary nvidia driver went open source, > it still wouldn't work with competing cards - the hw is too different. > Copying the _hardware_ is still a copyright infringement, and possibly > also a patent issue.
Hardware-related, ACK.
Bernd -- Firmix Software GmbH http://www.firmix.at/ mobil: +43 664 4416156 fax: +43 1 7890849-55 Embedded Linux Development and Services
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