Re: Linux, Inc. (Re: Linux GPL and binary module exception clause?)

Re: Linux, Inc. (Re: Linux GPL and binary module exception clause?)

[walt]

Rob Landley wrote:
> I suspect most people are going to ignore this message because it's so out 
> there and loopy, but I thought I'd address it because I think Andre is 
> serious...

It's very difficult to tell, but I assumed he wasn't -- or that's he's run
out of lithium again  ;0)



> ...I would have recommended that they use 
> FreeBSD, technical merit notwithstanding...

Hmm.  I think this kind of remark should be reserved for people who produce
demonstrably inferior products at outrageously high prices and use FUD as
their primary marketing strategy...

Re: Linux GPL and binary module exception clause?

[David Woodhouse]

On Fri, 2003-12-12 at 15:26 -0500, Brian Beattie wrote:
> I'd be willing to bet, that since bathing in creosote is extremely
> unhealthy, the courts might well find that that restriction was
> nonsense.  This being the case they might decide that taken as a whole
> the license was a fraud and grant the public the right to unrestricted
> use of the product in question.  Especially if the defendants lawyer was
> particularly good.

The misuse of copyright defence is _very_ limited, and it's not about
being reasonable or healthy.

If I charged money for my licence _and_ made the creosote requirement,
perhaps the court would be able to find a legal loophole which hasn't
yet been mentioned.

The court is much less likely to attempt this if the creosote is the
_only_ thing I'm asking for, and if that's the whole raison d'etre of my
licence, and the only reason I'm letting you use my work in the first
place.

Otherwise where does it end? I tell you that you can use my software
'when Hell freezes over' and since that's also unreasonable you get to
use it without restriction? :)

-- 
dwmw2

Linux, Inc. (Re: Linux GPL and binary module exception clause?)

[Andre Hedrick]

How about a charter orgainization called Linux, Inc. or The Linux
Foundation ?

CEO Linus Torvalds <aka ph> :-)
---
fill in the blanks.
---
CSA me <chief smart arse>

Now Linux, Inc is designed to regulate the commerial use of Linux and
defend the legal causes and actions of the kernel.  Everything has a cost.
Any company, organization, country, or what ever is required to pay 10% of
gross sales associated with products ship with Linux kernel inside,
period.

Distributions
Big Storage Companies
Big Box builders
Big Appliance Builders
blah blah ....
Set Top boxes
Firewall/VPN

Anybody who sells a product w/ the Linux Kernel as its base.

Now all the FSF/GPL supporting user space applications can go see FSF and
company because I do not give a damn about there issues.  They are l^Huser
land.

Now this allows for commerial adoption and commerial licnesing of Linux.
If this offer and idea is rejected then it proves the lack of seriousness
in the original goals of "world domination".

10% of Redhat,SuSE(Novell),Mandrake,Conectiva,UnitedLinux,...
10% of EMC,HP,IBM,Dell,Intel,...
10% of CGL people,...
10% of Rackable,Google,...
10% of the little guys ...

Now what to do with the money.

Hire really good SHARKS and ACCOUNTANTS ...
Fund and promote opensource development like a foundation ...
Yeah it starts to look like a business and that is what Linux needs.

Yeah, this is to simple and easy of an idea.

Cheers,

Andre Hedrick
LAD Storage Consulting Group

Re: Linux, Inc. (Re: Linux GPL and binary module exception clause?)

[Andre Hedrick]

Part II ...

Given the issue of binary module vendors not native to Linux rules and
standards, there becomes a need for a review body.  Given the problem of
most binary vendors are idiots and clueless, it provides a certification
for a given kernel.

It is short of racketeiring (sp) but it mean nobody gets to use all of
our hard work with out paying for it.  This is fair and equitable.

Oh yeah in order to be invited to the board or advisory board you have to
have some time in slavery to the kernel and continue to contribute.  Yeah
I am back off the nutter wagon and running around free again!

Dave Miller, can we have linux-wackos :-)

Cheers,

Andre Hedrick
LAD Storage Consulting Group

On Sat, 13 Dec 2003, Andre Hedrick wrote:

> 
> How about a charter orgainization called Linux, Inc. or The Linux
> Foundation ?
> 
> CEO Linus Torvalds <aka ph> :-)
> ---
> fill in the blanks.
> ---
> CSA me <chief smart arse>
> 
> Now Linux, Inc is designed to regulate the commerial use of Linux and
> defend the legal causes and actions of the kernel.  Everything has a cost.
> Any company, organization, country, or what ever is required to pay 10% of
> gross sales associated with products ship with Linux kernel inside,
> period.
> 
> Distributions
> Big Storage Companies
> Big Box builders
> Big Appliance Builders
> blah blah ....
> Set Top boxes
> Firewall/VPN
> 
> Anybody who sells a product w/ the Linux Kernel as its base.
> 
> Now all the FSF/GPL supporting user space applications can go see FSF and
> company because I do not give a damn about there issues.  They are l^Huser
> land.
> 
> Now this allows for commerial adoption and commerial licnesing of Linux.
> If this offer and idea is rejected then it proves the lack of seriousness
> in the original goals of "world domination".
> 
> 10% of Redhat,SuSE(Novell),Mandrake,Conectiva,UnitedLinux,...
> 10% of EMC,HP,IBM,Dell,Intel,...
> 10% of CGL people,...
> 10% of Rackable,Google,...
> 10% of the little guys ...
> 
> Now what to do with the money.
> 
> Hire really good SHARKS and ACCOUNTANTS ...
> Fund and promote opensource development like a foundation ...
> Yeah it starts to look like a business and that is what Linux needs.
> 
> Yeah, this is to simple and easy of an idea.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Andre Hedrick
> LAD Storage Consulting Group
> 
> -
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> 

Re: Linux, Inc. (Re: Linux GPL and binary module exception clause?)

[David S. Miller]

On Sat, 13 Dec 2003 17:06:50 -0800 (PST)
Andre Hedrick <andre@linux-ide.org> wrote:

> Dave Miller, can we have linux-wackos :-)

No, but I'll happily give you linux-fantasy or linux-utopia. :)

Re: Linux, Inc. (Re: Linux GPL and binary module exception clause?)

[Andre Hedrick]

Deal!

It also give a place to redirect all future threads and keep it of
linux-kernel, and you can apply something you really want ...

KILL THREAD !! :-)

linux-utopia-fantasy@vger.kernel.org

Cheers,

Andre Hedrick
LAD Storage Consulting Group

On Sat, 13 Dec 2003, David S. Miller wrote:

> On Sat, 13 Dec 2003 17:06:50 -0800 (PST)
> Andre Hedrick <andre@linux-ide.org> wrote:
> 
> > Dave Miller, can we have linux-wackos :-)
> 
> No, but I'll happily give you linux-fantasy or linux-utopia. :)
> 

Re: Linux, Inc. (Re: Linux GPL and binary module exception clause?)

[Rob Landley]

On Saturday 13 December 2003 19:06, Andre Hedrick wrote:
> Part II ...
>
> Given the issue of binary module vendors not native to Linux rules and
> standards, there becomes a need for a review body.

And thus a new layer of bureaucracy would be added to address a non-problem.
Study the history of usenix, will you?  Pay special attention to how it killed 
Atlanta Linux Showcase.  (Ask Peter Salus.)

>  Given the problem of
> most binary vendors are idiots and clueless, it provides a certification
> for a given kernel.

Sturgeon's law says that 90% of them are going to be clueless idiots, but 
that's nothing special.  The ones who make the binary modules that we 
actually care about are the 10% that _aren't_.

Nvidia, specifically, would love to release its code but it can't due to 
having licensed chunks of it from suppliers.  (Nvidia doesn't own all its own 
IP, it licenses huge chunks of it.)

> It is short of racketeiring (sp) but it mean nobody gets to use all of
> our hard work with out paying for it.  This is fair and equitable.

If you're mad that people use your hard work without paying for it, you have 
missed the entire POINT of open source.

I, personally, am fairly certain I have never paid you a dime.  My laptop has 
IDE in it, so I'd guess I'm using your work.  You have my thanks.  You do not 
have any of my money.  If this really bothers you, put a paypal link on your 
web page.

> Oh yeah in order to be invited to the board or advisory board you have to
> have some time in slavery to the kernel and continue to contribute.  Yeah
> I am back off the nutter wagon and running around free again!

I've run volunteer organizations.  I co-founded Penguicon, and I'm doing 
another one called Linucon here in Austin.  I put about $1000 of my own money 
into Penguicon, and I'm probably going to put more than that into Linucon, 
yet nobody involved with it actually got paid.  It was entirely volunteer 
run.  Even our guests of honor didn't get paid.  We flew Terry Pratchett in 
from England (a man who claims he had to switch banks having "filled the 
first one up" with book royalties), and although we bought his plane ticket, 
hotel room, and meals, we didn't actually give the man a dime.  (We did give 
him a badge ribbon that said "Geek", though, but that was more an award.)  
And he agreed to do it, and an important part was that nobody ELSE involved 
with it was paid a dime either, so it was hard to be jealous.

You've never run a volunteer effort.  It shows.  You clearly, profoundly, DO 
NOT UNDERSTAND how it works.  I admit it's a fairly tough thing to learn 
about from outside...

Here, this absolutely _sucks_, but it's the closest to a related write-up I've 
done:

http://www.fool.com/news/foth/2000/foth000731.htm
http://www.fool.com/news/foth/2000/foth000913.htm
http://www.fool.com/news/foth/2000/foth000905.htm
http://www.fool.com/news/foth/2000/foth000918.htm
http://www.fool.com/news/foth/2000/foth000925.htm
http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rulemaker000928.htm
http://www.fool.com/news/foth/2000/foth001002.htm

And some australian woman's follow-up...

http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_3/doheny/

I've needed to do a better write-up of this (that isn't stale, wrong in 
places, profoundly incomplete, and for a business audience) for years.  Bug 
me off-list if you're interested...

Rob

(Darn it, I ran a PANEL on this at Penguicon, with Jay Maynard of the Hercules 
project.  I just haven't got a convenient write-up I can point you to...)

Re: Linux, Inc. (Re: Linux GPL and binary module exception clause?)

[Rob Landley]

I suspect most people are going to ignore this message because it's so out 
there and loopy, but I thought I'd address it because I think Andre is 
serious.

On Saturday 13 December 2003 18:51, Andre Hedrick wrote:
> How about a charter orgainization called Linux, Inc. or The Linux
> Foundation ?

Why not an organization called OSDL?

> CEO Linus Torvalds <aka ph> :-)

Because he doesn't want to.

> Now Linux, Inc is designed to regulate the commerial use of Linux and

Regulating the commercial use of open source code.  Uh-huh.  And you honestly 
don't know why this won't work?

> defend the legal causes and actions of the kernel.  Everything has a cost.
> Any company, organization, country, or what ever is required to pay 10% of
> gross sales associated with products ship with Linux kernel inside,
> period.

Isn't this what SCO is trying to do?  Make everybody who ships Linux pay them 
money?  (And if them requiring money from people just to use Linux violates 
the GPL, why would _you_ be able to force people to?  We have a hard enough 
time getting source code out of people in basic compliance with the license 
terms, and you want money out of them, potentially in violation of the 
license?)

Alright, ignore that for a moment.  Think back: what if everybody who wanted 
to assemble a PC had to pay for a license to do so?  How far would PC 
hardware have gone?  On the left, you have the ISA bus, which is free to use.  
On the right, you have the micro-channel bus, which is patented and required 
a fee.

Which won in the open market?

> Now this allows for commerial adoption and commerial licnesing of Linux.

Excuse me, we HAVE commercial adoption and commercial licensing of Linux.  We 
have IBM putting a billion a year into it and HP putting $IBM*2 a year into 
their press releases.  Did you miss that memo?

> If this offer and idea is rejected then it proves the lack of seriousness
> in the original goals of "world domination".

PC hardware managed to avoid requiring anybody pay licensing fees for the 
basic design for 20 years now.  People have voluntarily joined consortia, but 
they haven't had to buy a license just to belong to the club of white box 
manufacturers or component vendors.

> 10% of the little guys ...

I've worked for little guys that this would have bankrupted.  And if such a 
requirement had been in place, I would have recommended that they use 
FreeBSD, technical merit notwithstanding.

> Now what to do with the money.

Belling the cat.

"Gee, if we only had a gazaillion dollars..."

> Hire really good SHARKS and ACCOUNTANTS ...
> Fund and promote opensource development like a foundation ...

There's about fifty.  Perl's got a foundation, Gnome has a foundation, KDE has 
a foundation...  Eric Raymond's most recent pet project was the Open Source 
Awards, which among other things involved giving cash to people who had done 
neat hacks.  (Sponsored by C/Net, if I remember...)

> Yeah it starts to look like a business and that is what Linux needs.

BeOS looked like a business.  OS/2 looked like a business.  Geos looked a lot 
like a business.  Desqview/X looked like a business.  AmigaOS looked like a 
business.

Ret Hat looks like a business.  Novell/SuSE looks like a business.  Lindows 
looks like a business.  (I'm not sure they ARE, but they LOOK like one...)

> Yeah, this is to simple and easy of an idea.

There's an old saying: "For every problem, there is a solution that's simple, 
easy, and wrong."  You're trying to address a problem that doesn't exist with 
a solution that nobody would support, and you're implying that the entire 
rest of the world is either stupid or not serious if they don't think you're 
idea is worth even the amount of attention it takes to respond negatively.

There are hundreds of thousands of people in the world who make their living 
from Linux right now.  Capitalism says that a couple percent of them are 
going to get royally screwed, no matter WHAT it is...

> Cheers,
>
> Andre Hedrick
> LAD Storage Consulting Group

Rob