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Originally posted by Lsatenstein If they are to support Linux, they have to provide this software for free and in open-source. (GNU license).
Thats not necessarily true, theres numerous pieces of closed source software available for linux, you have to be careful of the particular license details of the libraries,toolkits,etc. that you use though. For example the GNU GPL requires derivative works to be open source and free of charge while the LGPL explicitly excludes 'work that uses the library' from being considered a derivative work and therefore allows the library to be used in closed source software. (Disclaimer: I'm not a legal expert so I could have misinterpreted the license)
One particular example where the software is not free and not opensource is the Linuxant Driverloader (similar in purpose to ndiswrapper) which was partially open source and partially closed source the last time i looked at it. The closed source part (which was required to be able to use the open source part) was not free. Other examples I can think of off hand are mainly games like Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri, and even Doom 3 (though Doom 3 will probably be released as open source late going by Id's previous record)
So Intel could support linux if they wanted to, but it would be a bit of a legal minefield
It appears that Microsoft, hardware vendors, and the entertainment industry are insisting on new propriatory standards for hardware. What they want is secure hardware connections between audio equipement and the "box", and similar secure hardware connections between the DVD player, monitor, hard disk, etc. The entertainment industry wants to stop piracy, and feel that the hardware should be sealed.
What that may mean, if it comes to pass, is that linux will have to interface to this new hardware, if it comes about, and that interface will have been "patented or copyrighted". Perhaps work is already underway for this new set of interfaces, and that is why Intel, and perhaps others are ignoring Linux.
These are the same "enlightened" people who opposed: having radios in cars; cassette tapes; digital tapes; anything having to do with the Internet...
In other words, very wealthy, but generally clueless.
It simply isn't going to happen that way. People want movies and they want music. What the former studio moguls really don't want to acknowledge is that people are out there making music, and selling it, and keeping the profits, without studios. In many cases now, artists are paying studios for distribution-services (Prince was the first), and keeping whatever royalties there may be for themselves.
It's a given that these people will present this stuff as "it's a foregone conclusion, of course that all this is necessary..." but it isn't. They want to own it, because they've always owned it, and because they can't conceive of a viable business in which they don't "own it." And they are wrong. For once in their lives, their royalty-statements are going to have to be correct; the "expenses" they're used to charging artists (who were often in debt to their labels because of it) will be gone. And they won't come back.
For every action to seal hardware, software and the like, there will be a spinoff action. Intel would not want to lose out to competitors, and the competitors would not want to lose out to intel. But if I am in business, I would want to be able to 2nd source any product, especially if I am the government. Ergo, design changes would have to be open to government snooping (back door facilities), and hence open to all.
OK, what would the benefit be to this lockdown.
a) Hard disk technology: I can see technology changes shifting things away from the classical hard disk architecture to one where the disk subsystem is intelligent, taking away much of the recovery and performance tuning from the linux/mainframe drivers and ensuing software. Suppose that a disk system was split into two parts, with a large electronic portion only containing directories, and a secondary portion (on the spindle) for the data. That is, the directories would not be distributed around the disk as the are now, but held in a separate area. That area could be fully electronic so that directory searches and access to data would be rapid. Cacheing directories would be standard, and then let LRU algorithms be used for caching the data.
In other words, would we be seeing ram disks of giga or terabyte sizes?
Ask why should an operating system be concerned about storage. It is the storage manager's function. Today both are integrated into the kernel.
So, with the locking down of hardware, I foresee many new product enhancments.
That sounds like "security through obscurity," and guess what ... it doesn't work. It fails miserably. You simply can't dream up "the next big thing," seal all of its details against all comers, and charge a chosen-few an arm-and-a-leg to get to it. It may be a lawyer's dream, but engineering doesn't work that way. Engineering does not wait for the lawyers. Neither does the market.
Look at what IBM did, lo these years ago, to create what we call the "PC." They used entirely off the shelf parts. At first they were horrified and litigous when other programmers copied the BIOS and ... lo! ... improved upon it considerably. But then the tidal-wave started building momentum, and it "lifted all boats."
The best thing to-date that ever happened to the music industry ... was Napster. Yes, Napster. A college kid badly wanted what the music business could not dream of providing, knew it could be done, and did it. He didn't spend fifty million dollars and convene a hundred focus-groups to do it... he just did it. He did what no one else in the world had ever done. And although it certainly was illegal, that's not the point. The point was the utter vastness of its (entirely consumer-created, decentralized!) playlist. The damage-control efforts of the music industry mostly consisted of trying to keep the artists from realizing just how successful it was, but the artists could damn well see it for themselves. This "new thing" could take the oldiest, moldiest LP from the dark ages, one that never sold but a few thousand copies in its day, and show it a market. From there it was just a short step to a for-pay music distribution service that was entirely legal. Apple did one and sold 5 million copies of music in their first weekend. They didn't wait for Microsoft or any other "industry consortium" to "define a standard" for it... they developed the iPod, made it work, made it very cool, and sold it, also by the millions, long before the likes of Microsoft had even figured out who was driving that muscle-car that had just left them all in the dust.
(And it didn't take the artists too long to realize that their royalties had been being under-stated and under-paid for years.)
No matter how much fancy technology you dump into an effort to put the genie back into the bottle, that genie will never go back in ... and therefore, all the technological wizardy that may be diverted toward these ends is for naught. The rest is just irrelevant particulars. Spend all the money you want to... the idea sucks. The customer knows that it sucks, knows that he doesn't have to put up with it, knows that it offers him less than what he (legally) has today. So the whiz-bang technology really doesn't matter... the idea is wrong, and the project will fail.
Any hardware that doesn't have Linux on it, and quickly, is particularly doomed. Microsoft is never going to put that genie back into its bottle, either.
Last edited by sundialsvcs; 08-08-2005 at 08:03 PM.
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