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Linux Software

OSDL Denies Rewriting Kernel 237

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-duh-people dept.
yootje writes "Although there were rumours saying that OSDL writes a version of the Linux kernel that doesn't infringe patents (an argument that was used by Microsoft), OSDL denies this: 'OSDL officials have said that the report was not accurate, and that while Beaverton is putting $1.2m into economic development around open source software, this is not connected to rewriting the Linux kernel.'"
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OSDL Denies Rewriting Kernel More

OSDL Denies Rewriting Kernel

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  • Monkey on your back. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "Although there were rumours saying that OSDL writes a version of the Linux kernel that doesn't infringe patents (an argument that was used by Microsoft), OSDL denies this: "OSDL officials have said that the report was not accurate, and that while Beaverton is putting $1.2m into economic development around open source software this is not connected to rewriting the Linux kernel.""

    OK. So why exactly is rewriting the kernel a problem?

    • Re:Monkey on your back. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by GrAfFiT ( 802657 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @02:41PM (#11398084) Homepage
      It can be explained by SCO&co. as an implicit recognition of IP infringments.

    • Re:Monkey on your back. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by eno2001 ( 527078 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @02:42PM (#11398092) Homepage Journal
      My thoughts exactly. It's a free kernel. Anyone is damned well welcome to rewrite it. Now, the technical issues are many. All this talk of "complete rewrite from the ground up" tend to be bad ideas. The reason is that the original code may have some very good bits to it that you may bollocks if you write a completely new implementation. What is more needed from a technical point of view is a re-architecture. You keep the good stuff, replace the bad stuff and you're done. Keep in mind that it will take a long time to do, but it may be worth it in the end.

    • Re:Monkey on your back. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Wier ( 196038 )
      ...
      "OK. So why exactly is rewriting the kernel a problem?"

      Because it's not needed. The kernel is being constantly rewritten via incremental (hopefully better) changes.

      I would imagine that there is very little code in the kernel that has never been changed.

    • Re:Monkey on your back. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pclminion ( 145572 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @02:48PM (#11398177)
      OK. So why exactly is rewriting the kernel a problem?

      Because "rewriting the kernel to avoid patent infringement" implies that you knew about the infringements before, which makes you legally liable.

      It would be admitting that kernel developers knowingly used patented methods in the kernel, which would open them to willful infringement lawsuits.

      • There is always the chance however that the various contributors to the kernel-dev used methods not exactly like the alleged-IP's, but similiar enough to possibly legally warrant an infringement. I think rewriting those parts does not necessarily tell people that you knew about the infringements, but you only overlooked them perhaps. Due to the mass amount of people that can contribute to the kernel, its not the kernel-dev leaders fault if someone contributes IP property that was previously closed source to
      • It would be admitting that kernel developers knowingly used patented methods in the kernel

        I don't follow your logic there at all. You can equally well argue that they knew no such thing, but are rewriting any bit that is even vaguely suspicious to remove any possibility of infringement, now that such possibility has been brought to their attention.
    • If OSDL are rewriting it, it shows they know there's a big problem with it.
  • Oops, never mind. /dumb, but had to be done

  • Look at the source of the rumor (Score:5, Informative)

    by Vengeance ( 46019 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @02:40PM (#11398062)
    It was Maureen O'Gara, a writer without an ounce of credibility or ethics. She's been a huge part of the MicroSCOft campaign against Linux all along, this is just another bow shot.

  • Sorry to state the obvious (Score:5, Funny)

    by k98sven ( 324383 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @02:40PM (#11398065) Journal
    But given the current state of things, I'm pretty unsure that you can write any computer program of complexity beyond 'hello world' without infringing on at least one software patent.

  • More FUD from O'Gara (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Foofoobar ( 318279 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @02:41PM (#11398076)
    PJ over at Groklaw [groklaw.net] has a nice write up on this. Is it just me or is Maureen O'Gara just part of the FUD-machine funded by SCO?

    Hmmm... I wonder how much reporter integrity goes for on the open market?
    • SCO doesn't have enough cash to fund a junior high school newsletter.

    • Re:More FUD from O'Gara (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MrWa ( 144753 )
      $240,000 - or atleast that is how much Armstrong Williams's [crikey.com.au] integrity costs.
    • Depends on the journalist's profile, market and existing salary. It also depends on if it's a one time story, a series of articles or an ongoing bias.

      They gave us the price chart in one of my College Journalism classes, but I it's languishing in the basement. There's a theoretical "ethical surcharge" for advocating something you find morally abhorrent, but it's rarely charged. Most journalists don't have enough ethics to justify charging the extra fee.
    • FTA: However, a source close to Open Source Risk Management (OSRM), which commissioned Ravicher's review, claimed to know what the Jan. 25 announcement was and told NewsForge that it had nothing to do with Ravicher's study.
      So, come on Bruce... what's the announcement. We know they meant you! Spill it baby.
    • The last confirmed payout for "reporter
      integrity" is $240K USD. Considering:
      (1) the general state of the USA economy,
      (2) there are holiday bills to be paid,
      and (3) Dubya's push to lower wages,
      that $240K may represent a high point.

      BTW: The fee is a really a private
      negotiation between the "John"
      and the "Hooker", so YMMV.
  • The article at the centre of this particular storm-in-a-teacup was written by the infamous Maureen O'Gara, who regularly gets dumped on over at groklaw for the quality and balance of her linux reportage and whose company (G2 computer intelligence) is behind a motion in Utah connected to the SCO IBM case to unseal submissions to the Court by both parties. Summary: Nothing to see here.

  • Maybe... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by deafpluckin ( 776193 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @02:44PM (#11398117)
    ...this sounds like complete bs. For the sake of argument, instead of rewriting the kernel maybe they (ibm, redhat, novelle, whoever) should be working on developing material that would help them in any court cases against Microsoft, i.e. prior art and whatever else can help to combat any of those 27 patents.

    Then, if there's a patent that they think MS might try to stick them with, re-write/change only that part of the kernel that's affected.

    Am I the only one that thinks an entire re-write for operating system technologies that have been around long before MS is a little silly?
  • Sounds like an awful lot of work to achieve the same aim. And if what is being done here is effectively reverse-engineering, isn't there the risk of falling into the same trap again, i.e. inadvertently writing into the kernel patent-infringing code?
  • Step 1: cp -R kernel.orig kernel.infringement-free
    Step 2: There is no step 2. Alas, there is also no Step 3: Profit.

  • Fud-meisters at work (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ashe Tyrael ( 697937 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @02:53PM (#11398240)
    I can just see the fud-meisters now.

    "They aren't going to rewrite the kernel to take out our patented stuff. So it must be in there!"

    While not the gist of any of the statements, that viewpoint can be made to fit.

    Ah, the power of spin.

  • OSDL dispatches Iraqi Minister of Information (Score:3, Funny)

    by PocketPick ( 798123 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @02:54PM (#11398247)
    OSDL, god praise it's name, wishes to send out noice that there is no re-writing of Linux kernel, nor has there ever been any attempt to re-write it. These are the truths! Even if there were attempts to re-write it, which ther are not, it would only be by word of our great master, IBM.

    Only the infidels at Microsoft could create such lies, and surely would admit it if they were not such cowards, hiding in thier cubes like the unholy nerds that they are. God willing, capitalist proprietary software will fail under the great crush of thier devil-like closed-source policies. Indeed, I do not doubt this. Praise OSDL.

  • Not accurate? Uh, oh. Here we go again... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @02:56PM (#11398273)
    "OSDL officials have said that the report was not accurate..."

    I always hate in when PR types use this phrase. Mind you, I like the OSDL, I just hate the "was not accurate" thing. For example...

    "The report that Mr. Jones embezzled $10.5 million was not accurate." REASON: Mr. Jones actually embezzled $10,548,984. Its the classic non-denial denial where you deny something in super-general or super-specific terms, while not adding anything meaningful at the same time. It is more about perception than truth.

    I don't know if the OSDL is playing perceptions vs. truth here, but I don't like things that are phrased in that particular manner for those reasons.
    • Well, if they made the statement "The Linux kernel is not being re-written" they would be incorrect. The kernel is constantly re-written, but not for intellectual property reasons.
    • It is more about perception than truth.

      As a natural born PR type, let me warn you- perception is truth. Or at least it matters more.

    • I don't know if the OSDL is playing perceptions vs. truth here, but I don't like things that are phrased in that particular manner for those reasons.

      I hear what you're saying, but I can't see anyone rewriting anything for patent reasons, at least not until the first reasonably sensible (ie. not SCO) lawsuit shows up. (This assumes that there is a single not-easily-dismissable patent infringed; for the purposes of this argument let's pretend there is)

      Largely because the implications are huge. I'm thinkin
    • The problem is that MOG is really smart. She deliberately writes her stories so that all the facts are true or attributed to an anonymous source so you end up with the wrong conclusion.

      Look at this story [groklaw.net] on Groklaw.

      PJ refutes one of MOGs stories but what PJ didn't notice is that every sentence in the article was true when taken by itself. The fact that they combined to give you a false impression that was the opposite of what happenned is a problem for the reader to deal with.

  • What do they mean, "doesn't infringe patents"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @03:16PM (#11398553)
    The whole concept of a kernel which doesn't infringe patents is ridiculous. You don't decide what is and is not infringement by reading through source code in some magical process. You decide it when some patent holder says "this piece of code here infringes on my patent!" and then both parties either agree or go to court and then the court comes up with some resolution. There are millions of patents out there and there are millions of lines of code in the kernel. There's no such thing as a magical search engine that you can plug a piece of code into and see which patents apply to it. Even things that are heavily promoted as "patent-free" such as PNG, Ogg, and others, might be infringing some patent. There is just no way to say with certainty in this. The patent office grants so many crappy patents all the time that it's hard to say that any very large body of code (like the kernel) doesn't possibly infringe on something.

    This is all why big companies tend to enter into cross-licensing agreements with eachother. They know that it's almost inevitable that if you write enough code, you will write something that could reasonably be argued to infringe on some patent that no one has ever heard of. In fact even the companies that hold enormous numbers of patents don't have the ability to check all the code that is out there.

    This area of law is only defined and made certain in practice involving specific patents and specific code. For someone to make claims about some code not infringing is completely bogus.

    I remember all the arguments about PGP vs. the RSA patent and how much time was wasted arguing about that patent and worrying about it, when a) it was never clear that it was a valid patent and b) RSA never enforced it up until the time it expired.

    The right thing to do is to be fearless about these things. If there is an infringement, let the patent holder notify the kernel developers about what the patent is and which regions of code are infringing. The ODSL should then get a lawyer to talk with the developers, look over the patent and the code in question, and see if the patent holder's claim makes sense. If it does, then it is time to think about coding around the patent, but until that set of things has happened, trying to code around patents that may or may not be enforceable is just a waste of time.

    Patents are not at all like copyrights. Copyright is usually pretty clear: there's a piece of work authored by someone and that work is or is not similar to some other work. If it is too similar there is infringement and it's pretty easy to see usually. Patents just aren't like that at all.
    • Even things that are heavily promoted as "patent-free" such as PNG, Ogg, and others, might be infringing some patent.

      Specifically, PNG was written to side-step specific GIF patents, whilst Ogg was written to avoid specific MP3 patents. There is no guarantee that the authors avoided these patents completely, or that there aren't *other* patents that may be infringed by these projects.

      Xix.

  • How would you begin such a project anyway? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MrLint ( 519792 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @03:31PM (#11398799) Journal
    Given the nature of the USTPO, where any obvious or ancient idea (like swinging on a swing sideways) gets a patent, how can you possibly rewrite something that you can guarantee wont infringe on some over broad chicken scratch filed in the 70's when they had wire wrapped electronics and nixie tubes in cash registers.

    By the time you are done whats to stop someone from patenting the code you are working on. Even if its invalid, you get tied up in court either way.

    The problem is the system, and the system alone.
    • I agree. The astonishing growth of the PC market was due partially because there were very little patent hinderance. The sole purpose of the current patent system is to keep the status quo in place. "Little" companies like Microsoft who have grown up, do not want to be replaced by smaller companies with better ideas.


  • IANAL, but it doesn't take one to read what other companies are doing. Are IBM, HP, Red Hat, and Sun slowing down due to SCO....nope. They are actually speeding up! Anyone who has any inkling of fear over SCO needs to get a hug and some hot cocoa and go worry about things that matter.
  • What the hell is an"OSDL official"?

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