On Fri, Jul 15, 2005 at 12:21:13PM -0700, W. Wayne Liauh wrote: > JDS never took off b/c imho it "was" based on a platform (GPL/Linux) > that was, on hindsight, never suitable for a desktop OS. A desktop > involves as much hardware as it does software. GPL was developed > strictly from the point of view of software. Essentially all the > GPL demigods fail to recognize that while software can be protected > by copyrights, hardware cannot. For a hardware company, once you > "open source" your little secret, you are instantly reduced to > nothing. Your shareholders will never allow you to do that, and if > you do, there is a potential for criminal liabilities. (If you are > from Linux background, treat my last statement as FUD.)
I'll ignore the last sentence, because I'd rather talk about the rest. Nobody is suggesting that the code inside hardware needs to be available as source in order for GNOME or any kind of desktop open source operating system to succeed. The constraint that the GPL imposes on driver developers is that the drivers need to be available as source. The belief that the programmer's interfaces to a device must be kept secret to prevent others from implementing the hardware is fallacious. It implies that there's nothing more to designing and implementing hardware than the programmer's view of the device, that knowing how to make a device work is the same as knowing how to make the device. Put another way, it implies that knowing that writing a certain value to a register does a certain thing means that you know how to make that certain thing happen, and could produce devices that do it on a cost and time scale that's competitive with the original vendor. Accepting as a valid argument against open source drivers the kind of institutional paranoia that hardware vendors seem to have is a step backward for the open source community as a whole. I should note that the CDDL is a major concession to this idea, as it doesn't place any constraints on the licenses of other components, including drivers, even when they are linked in or share the same address space. So these arguments don't apply to OpenSolaris. The vendors are welcome to take advantage of this concession, but I really would rather educate them if at all possible. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" Solaris Kernel Team "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!" _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
