[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> As usual, I will not reply to a completely untechnical post on the newsgroup.
> However, I should point out that I admire the consistency with which Lineo
>beneficiaries
> repeat the advertising slogan and forget to point out that they have a financial
> incentive.
>
Your answer to my public posting was outright unwarranted, unjustified and completely
unacceptable. Even your base assumption is completely inaccurate and goes to show
that you are very much unaware of the personalities of the people your are referring
to and their motivations.
For the public record, I think it ought to be known that I have my opinions and
motivations which are not for sale even though I do offer my expertise commercially.
I accepted to develop LTT support for RTAI under Lineo sponsorship because we agreed
on the way the project should be done and on it's ultimate goal. This included making
sure the resulting code was available for everyone in the best quality it could be.
Lineo's initiative showed that they were inclined to fund open-source projects and
share their expertise while respecting the open-source movement. My duty, as an
open-source contributor, was to make sure that the project remained free. Having
secured this, I see no reason why I shouldn't offer my expertise to participate in
my project's development as I would do to participate in any other consulting activity
that I usually do. Ergo, your assumption is wrong. There was financial
__compensation__,
but the incentive was that of an open-source enthusiast who wanted to add new features
to a project he very much enjoys working on.
As for your constant desire to point out that Lineo is contributing to RTAI, the
community should be aware that you yourself are very much a commercial entity making
money around RTL. Your patent __and__ the fact that most RTL code is copyrighted to
FSMLabs are the proof of this. I had privately raised questions about those two
items, but you never answered fully. You even went to the point of ridiculing me and
saying that I didn't have any weight to discuss such things since I hadn't contributed
anything to the open-source movement. You were forced to drop that line when I pointed
out that I was the author of the Linux Trace Toolkit, but you still weren't very
interested in clarifying things. Today, I must say that only one of the four questions
I asked remain unanswered. That is, I still have no explanation as to why you are
now the lead RTL developer and not M. Barbanov. I also inquired about the reason of
this switch, was it voluntary or "forced"? In a subquestion, I asked why Micheal's
name wasn't on the patent. If nothing else, this really intrigues me. Isn't he
the first to have implemented RTL? Doesn't he deserve to be on the patent. In any case,
we might never know, but going back to the patent and copyright thing, I think some
things should be made very clear to the open-source community. And in my opinion,
these two items can't be viewed separately.
Having copyrighted RTL code to FSMLabs, FSMLabs, as a commercial entity, and Victor
Yodaiken, as the CEO, can decide to commercially sell the source code to any private
entity. How is this? Well, they own the copyright (look at the file headers). This
means they can choose to distribute this in as many licensees as they which. Why?
Simple, RTL is under GPL and if any commercial entity wanted to patch their OS with it,
they'd suffer GPL contamination. Of course, this isn't definitive and the GPL hasn't
been tested enough to disprove this possibility, but it would be fair to say that no
commercial entity would take such a risk. But then why couldn't they simply do their
own simili-RTL for their own OS? Well, they can't ... Victor owns the patent to that
idea. Case closed.
This might be clear for you Victor, but very few people in the open-source community
see this and I think that a lot of people in the community would be outraged by this.
Frankly, I think your are doing a great disservice to the community by behaving so
recklessly towards the freedoms and obligations the GPL embodies. Lineo is clearly
a commercial entity, they've never tried to hide this. You, on the other hand, are
dancing on both feet between the open-source world and the commercial world, trying
to make everyone believe that you're the only reference and that all the others are
bad guys. In the open-source world, you claim to be the RTL benevolent dictator leading
the way for bringing real-time to Linux and in the commercial world, you trumpet your
company's "possessions" (RTL) and "powers" (the patent). Acting as an open-source
leader,
you take the liberty to attack a commercial company on the grounds that they are
coercing developers into adopting RTAI while you are yourself a commercial entity who's
whole existence and financial future is based on the success of RTL.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't jump into the RTAI bandwagon out of the blue for no
reason. Actually, I have been following the development of RTL since 1996, at least,
and was an adamant fan of RTL. At that time, I was very proud to present RTL to many
people using conventional RTOSes and point out that RTL was an open-source alternative.
Few were convinced, but I thought that Micheal's code was amazing and that the idea was
great, even though it seemed to be deja-vu. When I started working on the Linux
Trace Toolkit, bringing LTT support for RTL was my ultimate dream. I thought that
this would surely make it very clear that Linux could be used as an embedded/RT OS.
Having been very busy developing LTT and attending every day obligations, I only
got time to check LTT support for RTL in autumn '99, some time __after__ the first
release. I went over to www.rtlinux.org and downloaded a copy of the latest RTL.
To my dreadful surprise, someone had tried to instrument RTL. Not only that, but
the code used to instrument RTL was severely familiar. No mention of my name could
be found anywhere and no mention of the addition was made to any file. I only knew
because I read the source code. This happened somewhere between beta 15 and beta 16
in September '99, clearly two months after LTT's first release.
I was very disappointed by this. I thought to myself that if you take an idea from
someone it would be the least of things to drop him an e-mail and tell him that you
really liked what he did and that you might build on that. Least of things, you might
ask him about what advice he might have about the problems he encountered so that you
wouldn't fall in the same traps. You could even inquire about his desire to help out.
It seems all of this was too much to ask.
Therefore, there is no surprise that I find it very credible when someone states that
they've been copied by RTL and that they received no credit for their work. In
Paolo's HAL case, this was blatant. There is no surprise either when I state that
I am firmly against including any RTL code into the Linux source code. You've
misbehaved
once, that's OK. RTAI will probably live on. Allowing such a mistake with Linux would
be very harmfull to the open-source movement.
This is not the first time I post my views on your methods and motivations. On the
last occasion, I was very flamy (accusing you of M$ behavior). Ensued a private
discussion were I agreed to publicly apologize for my flaming so that we might
continue the discussion at a more productive level. As I said above, the discussion
didn't lead anywhere and I eventually abandoned it. This time though, my previous
posting did not warrant any of your flak.
We probably will never agree on any of the things I'm pointing out and that's OK
with me. One thing though, do refrain from spreading FUD about things you do not
understand. If not for yourself, then for the negative image you are spreading about
the open-source community.
Sincerely
Karim Yaghmour
===================================================
Karim Yaghmour
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Operating System Consultant
(Linux kernel, real-time and distributed systems)
===================================================
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