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They are trying to fight off Linux
They are trying to fight off Linux
Posted Sep 12, 2007 17:32 UTC (Wed) by endecotp (guest, #36428)In reply to: They are trying to fight off Linux by leoc
Parent article: QNX source released - sort of
Absolutely. Everyone I know who has used a closed embedded OS has a horror story of spending months finding subtle bugs that would have been apparent in seconds if they had had the code. This normally involves disassembling the code and logic analysers. From an entirely pragmatic point of view, this is the greatest strength of Free/open-source software in this market segment.
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They are trying to fight off Linux
Posted Sep 13, 2007 3:58 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]
> Everyone I know who has used a closed embedded OS has a horror story> of spending months finding subtle bugs that would have been apparent
> in seconds if they had had the code.
Exactly the reason they are doing this and their customers will almost certainly welcome this development. Personally I think this level of openness needs to be legally mandated.
Think about it, copyright exists to "promote progress in the Sciences and Useful Arts" not to prop up a business model or produce profit. The hope for profit IS supposed to be a motivation of course, the Founding Fathers were not Communists. But this idea of keeping the source locked away where it is often lost when companies die does NOTHING to promote Progress in anything except wheel reinvention. And it is just a technical artifact of the early computer hardware, increasingly requiring more and more twisted methods to keep the idea alive. (See the PHP/Javascript code obfuscation industry.)
No, we need a better way. Copyright should be granted only on SOURCE CODE on condition that the customer get a copy of it and all the bits they need to read/compile/etc the original vendor has (except of course 3rd party closed source tools) so the code is readable and understandable by the customer. In the case of commercial code, fully protected by Copyright and not redistributable without a license, etc. But readable. You can Copyright an expression of an idea but not the Idea itself, others should be able to see it and learn. (Leaving the whole subject of software Patents for another rant.) Customers could port to new platforms, patch bugs and generally keep a product alive after being abandoned by the original vendor by distributing patchsets.
Compiled binaries should only be protected as "derived works" of the actual copyrighted work, but a court should be able to declare it void if a vendor refuses to publish the actual source that the binary was built from.