On Thu, Sep 30, 1999 at 11:11:51AM +0100, Stuart Hughes wrote:
> To me the more serious commercial question is one of copyright and
> license. It worries me that rtl_fifo.c is now just 'Copyright VYJ' with
> no acknowlegement of its origin (fs/pipe.c). In my opinion this file
> should really include the original copyright of Linus Torvalds, and add
> the VYJ copyright to that. The only conclusion I can draw from VYJ
> trying to reserve exclusive copyright is that one day there will be
> non-GPL versions of RTL. This is not wrong, but I think people using
> RTL should be aware of this.
Come on Stuart, don't be absurd. Read the code.
The copyright notice in fifo.c in our release is unchanged for 2 years and
doesn't mention VJY, General Motors, or Bill Gates, so there
is no need to worry so much.
/*
* RT-FIFO devices
*
* 1997, Michael Barabanov
*
* A lot of this code is stolen from fs/pipe.c
*
*/
This was written as part of Michael's thesis and I can't imagine
anyone seeing it as a claim of title to Linus's code.
RTLinux will continue to be released under GPL/LGPL.
Copyright holders do have the option of releasing their code under
other licenses in addition.
This is done, for example, by the authors of
Ghostcript. So, we may provide _our_ code under a BSD style
or other license to vendors of hardware who are worried about
having to reveal their embedded code to competitors.
Such releases have _no_ impact on people using the GPL
version of the code. You know this very well.
> Maybe you can explain why the latest RTL betas are only available from
> fsmlabs.com ??
They are available on mirrors as well. Purchase price has doubled from
the original $0 (we accept also Euros) due to inflation and unbridled greed for wealth.
I'm planning on monthly increases of this magnitude until the
corporate jet gets paid for and our 90 story office tower in
Socorro New Mexico is completed. Readers of this list can still,
for a limited time only, get a 25% discount if they send
in their RTLinux Virtual Cereal Boxtops. Stuart, I'll give you a
special 30% discount to make you less worried. Please send all
boxtops to theglobe.com which is sending us tons of junk email.
As for the API, I've been posting technical notes on the
API and proposed changes for months. Technical comments, complaints,
praise, hopes, etc, are always welcomed and we have made changes
in response. The original API is still supported as well. Perhaps
I've missed the discussion of what should be changed in these APIs from
your point of view, and in this case, please resend. I'm sorry to
say that comments of the form "you should merge with X" will
continue to be ignored. What I'm interested in are comments of the
form "X does Y which is good because of Z" where Y and Z are concrete
and meaningful in a technical sense. People who want to change code
in an open-source model have two choices. Choice (1) is to provide
patches and advocate for inclusion of the changes. Choice (2) is to
start a second line of development. If you follow (2), it's a little
funny to then complain about divergence, but there are worse sins.
If you want to send in a RTAI style scheduler that will run under
RTLinux, I'd be happy to include it in the distribution.
Enough of this nonsense. I've got to see what new horrors Ingo has
done to irq.c and he is smarter than me so it's not
easy to figure it out.
--- [rtl] ---
To unsubscribe:
echo "unsubscribe rtl" | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR
echo "unsubscribe rtl <Your_email>" | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
----
For more information on Real-Time Linux see:
http://www.rtlinux.org/~rtlinux/
