SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/03/linux_kernel_grsecurity_sues_bruce_perens_for_defamation/
In late June, noted open-source programmer Bruce Perens warned that using Grsecurity's Linux kernel security could invite legal trouble.
"As a customer, it's my opinion that you would be subject to both contributory infringement and breach of contract by employing this product in conjunction with the Linux kernel under the no-redistribution policy currently employed by Grsecurity," Perens wrote on his blog.
The following month, Perens was invited to court. Grsecurity sued the open-source doyen, his web host, and as-yet-unidentified defendants who may have helped him draft that post, for defamation and business interference.
Grsecurity offers Linux kernel security patches on a paid-for subscription basis. The software hardens kernel defenses through checks for common errors like memory overflows. Perens, meanwhile, is known for using the Debian Free Software Guidelines to draft the Open Source Definition, with the help of others.
Linus Torvalds, who oversees the Linux kernel, has called Grsecurity's patches "garbage".
... (read the rest at the register)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Sunday August 06 2017, @05:10AM (2 children)
There are many ways to make a living around the Free / Open Software ecosystem. Selling software ain't one of them. Packaged software is a small part of the software universe. Most people who depend on software are the only one who will use it. Selling them the service of taking a bunch of free bits and adding a few percent (by line count) of original code can pay well. Even if you modified GPL code, the one entity who you gave a copy to has no reason to redistribute it so it probably won't flow back into the repos but since it was specific to their needs that probably isn't a big loss. If some of the changes are generally useful you could upstream them to benefit from the bug fixing and such from the rest of the world and still not be giving away business logic that would harm your customer. Other money is available to FLOSS devels writing device drivers for the hardware makers who simply want to sell stuff.
But the big change in Free Software is we don't have to keep rewriting the same damned 90% of a software product over and over again, watch the company go bankrupt and somebody else have to assemble a team and start from zero yet again. Nobody is going to be writing another closed source web server. If that was your dream, sorry it has been smashed to bits. And from all appearances Windows and OS X are probably the last closed operating systems. Done with that. Eventually we will have a Free Software speech recognition engine cross the "good enough" line and all future development will happen there because writing a new one from scratch by any single entity is already at the edge of plausible but will be "no fricking way" by then. And so on. The Free Software phase is basically the "enough rewriting this damned class of software" phase.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 06 2017, @12:50PM
Qt post-Nokia is back in the selling upgrades model - not sure who they get with that pitch but it must be working for them or they wouldn't put so much effort into it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Tuesday August 08 2017, @07:53AM
I considered this case a few days ago and I concur. Open source text to speech lagged proprietary implementations by almost 10 years. But where are we now? Open source software, such as Festival, is the most popular choice. Going the other way, closed source implementations of speech to text are sufficient for some applications and laughably inadequate for others. Closed sources implementations are likely to stradle this divide for prolonged period. Open source implementations may lag significantly during this period and encounter the similar dificiencies but then we'll have it forever.
One difficulty will be maintaining an open and current corpus of words. This is particularly problematic for real-time speech translation. If your corpus spans a decade or five then specific phrasing (or even specific intonation) may lead to a choice of phrase which is outmode or offensive. However, if the corpus is extremely current, it may be desirable to weight elements by demographic. Otherwise an elderly businessman may sound like an edgy youngster. This is not likely to have the desired gravitas and I doubt that the reverse situation is desirable either.
1702845791×2