Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 16:01:03 -0800
From: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>
To: Alistair John Strachan <s0348365@sms.ed.ac.uk>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>,
       Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario
Message-ID: <20051207000103.GD2838@holomorphy.com>
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On 12/5/05, William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com> wrote:
>>> I expect the closed source IP affairs rather to keep chipping away
>>> until Linux is dead, or they get tired and change strategies to kill it,
>>> versus any sudden changes of course.

On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 06:44:56PM +0000, Alistair John Strachan wrote:
> The problem with this approach is the tiny size of the minority of customers 
> using ATI's video cards on a non-Windows OS.
> I think the only way we can persuade vendors to not take the direction that 
> Arjan speculates they will, is to increase the Linux userbase (and therefore 
> ATI customers using Linux) by making "Desktop Linux" increasingly competent.
> As easy as it is to be pessimistic about binary vendor lockin, there's still 
> places in industry, government and inevitably the general public where Linux 
> is slowly starting to take off as a real desktop alternative to Windows.
> When this happens, vendors will just have to solve all the IP nonsense 
> associated with their hardware, or design hardware to be more dependent on 
> firmware so that largely open source drivers are more feasible for them.

Linux has exempted itself from IP regulations of various countries by
a form of jurisdictional arbitrage, especially in the realms of reverse
engineering and cryptography. These sorts of IP regulations have strong
support from entrenched hardware, software, and entertainment interests,
and as the establishment of international/supranational regulatory
agencies proceeds and as regulatory "harmonizations" advance, this
jurisdictional arbitrage will become progressively more difficult to
continue. In particular, the "intellectual property" lobbyists, unless
challenged on a scale heretofore unseen, are likely to attempt to
convince individual governments to implement similar regulations one by
one as well as use such international/supranational affairs as the WTO,
EUCD, et al to impose such on countries otherwise disinclined to do so.

In particular, there is word of an initiative in France that threatens
to ban Linux and possibly all open-source software outright as
containing insufficient protections against the illegal dissemination
of copyrighted works, and/or as presenting some sort of threat to
royalty-based software, and/or (if I understand the notion properly) an
"illegal subsidy" to competitors of for-profit software firms, as
public utilities and other nonprofit and/or governmentally-erected
infrastructure have been ruled to be in various other instances. In
essence, a counterpart of the DMCA which declares open source software
and/or Linux a technology that can circumvent copyright protection, if
the DMCA doesn't do so itself.

Also, IP issues related to hardware are unlikely to stand still. As
observed earlier, several hardware vendors are looking to close their
driver source or to only offer binary drivers in the future. The
jurisdictional arbitrage under which the reverse engineering so common
for the implementation of open source drivers takes place is also
rather likely to be thwarted by similar attempts to promote legislation
to the above entertainment-related efforts.

So, as seen above, the "IP issues," if they're getting resolved at all,
don't appear to be getting resolved in Linux' favor. To all
appearances, there is literally an effort to legislate Linux out of
existence. One might call this "lawfare" (warfare through legislation)
against Linux.


-- wli
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