Re: [rtl-advocacy] Re: [realtime] Re: Open letter to Victor Yodaiken, re RTLinux patentlicense

[Karim Yaghmour <karym@opersys.com>]

I hadn't seen this one, but I think that this one should be
answered.

Der Herr Hofrat wrote:
>
> I personally don't realy understand the problem with the way
> yodaiken is handling this issue, on the one hand there seems
> to be irritation that its not in the "spirit" of GPL , on the
> other hand the complain is that release of non-GPL conde is hurt
> under theses terms. This means to me that RTLinux
> should stay GPL so that non-GPL projects can profit from it.
> that obviously makes littl sense. If everyone wants GPL,
> fine , then there is no problem, just write GPL'ed code.

You forget that the commercial/academic applications have been
a driving force behing GPL/open-source projects. That is, even
non-GPL projects can be beneficial to GPL projects. The reason
is simple: When a commercial or academic project uses an GPL
project as the basis of a non-GPL project, they often end up
finding bugs or mistakes in the GPL project and will often provide
fixes for these bugs back to the GPL project while still maintaining
their non-GPL project. Add to that the fact that many of these
commercial/academic projects want some capabilities to be available
but don't want to have to maintain them. Hence, they'll contribute
a capability and will let the community take care of it.

Following your rational, everyone who adopted Linux should have
been expected to think that their code would have to be GPL.
Read Linux's history and you will see that if that were the case,
then Linux wouldn't have gotten as far as it did today. StarOffice
is a perfect example of this.

With the patent license as it is, V.Y. is not only punishing
RTAI and RTLinux users, but he'll also force commercial engineers to
seriously consider using proprietary technology instead of open
technology. Seriously, FSMLabs is no LynuxWorks, QNX or WindRiver
and will never be one. But with the current state of things, some people
may seriously think about using the proprietary real-time technologies
provided by some of these vendors as they offer the same API and,
sometimes, even the same binary interface as Linux (meaning you can run
Linux apps on them transparently) with toolsets and support far more
mature than anything FSMLabs will ever be able to offer.

Way to go open-source.

Best regards,

Karim

===================================================
                 Karim Yaghmour
               karym@opersys.com
          Operating System Consultant
 (Linux kernel, real-time and distributed systems)
===================================================