Samsung Puts Out New Open-Source ARM DRM Driver

[crazycheese]

For many reasons ranging from not needing the complexity or the bulk of a "more advanced" kernel

Yeah, then they cut linux kernel to their desires. Same as google did.

and proper access to technologies and features not found in the linux kernel some of which is because incompatible licensing.

Such as?
GPL and BSD are perfectly compatible. To the point someone decides to steal the code, close it down and start charging upon it. This is protection of freedom: to tolerate all, except those who doesn´t tolerate freedom is GPL main advantage and protection. Yeah, GPL protects freedom, not only declares it. And in event someone wants to sell the code, he is free to dual-license it as special case. And again, in such case he will benefit the original creator, he won´t just get away with stealing. And for the cases someone wants to share to the point of do-anything-you-want, he gives it in public domain. The license text will be cut anyway and code obfuscated, so BSD makes no difference.

It's more like they didn't want to be restricted to the terms of the GPL which is a valid concern for many reasons.

Yeah, exactly, they prefer BSD to GPL for only reason - the difference in licensing. Cristal clear as water - they want to take and close it down. And they don´t want anyone looking inside their code, for whatever legal reasons.

I'll also point out that there is a crapload of devices and projects that utilize GPL code that are not it compliance. GPL doesn't do sweet squat until someone has the time and financial ability to protect those terms.

Two single points where I agree with you. But do americans protect their constitution? Or russians? Most of times, no Any legal act requires enforcement, nothing special.

Like I said before, I guarantee you that you have personally benefited from a permissive license. In fact I guarantee you that your linux system has a lot of code uses such licenses. That is the great thing about BSD like licenses is that it allows EVERYONE to utilize it, not just a select group.

I have no problem with the code using this license, I have problem when the amount of code using this license expands to the scale of whole kernel.
Reason?

Using educational centers as pets to empower their local research subdivision. Giving only portions of code back and separating it (by amount of effort and time needed to learn, by design, by market share, by patents) so that students actually learn and advance proprietary parts instead of collaborating with commercial sector on completely open basis.

Slave 2nd class sheep feeding aristocratic wolves. Deanjo, you´re using and working for Apple. Why not *BSD? Cause *BSD is not good for desktop. And it cannot be done better for desktop, cause Apple doesn´t give much away, following their (BSD) license. Yet Apple took whole whoop of technology from them, for free. Professors carrying out development of their own system, on their own; sometimes getting pieces from the table and dreaming to work elsewhere. Awesome Sounds a lot like ReactOS, but in unix way

You claimed I benefited from it in linux, you surely mean CUPS etc. But, don´t you claimed some months ago that CUPS sucks in linux? Cause, yes it prints, but it is hardly usable: the network functionality is not a problem - the problem is drivers, and CUPS or its license does not change anything. Kodak for example, does MacOSX drivers, but completely ignores linux. I´m proud to use HP <3, but yes I use alternative ink.

[deanjo]

Such as?
GPL and BSD are perfectly compatible. To the point someone decides to steal the code, close it down and start charging upon it. This is protection of freedom: to tolerate all, except those who doesn´t tolerate freedom is GPL main advantage and protection. Yeah, GPL protects freedom, not only declares it. And in event someone wants to sell the code, he is free to dual-license it as special case. And again, in such case he will benefit the original creator, he won´t just get away with stealing. And for the cases someone wants to share to the point of do-anything-you-want, he gives it in public domain. The license text will be cut anyway and code obfuscated, so BSD makes no difference.

Oh such as items like the offering that are out on a CDDL license just for example although there are many more. ZFS, dtrace, etc

Yeah, exactly, they prefer BSD to GPL for only reason - the difference in licensing. Cristal clear as water - they want to take and close it down. And they don´t want anyone looking inside their code, for whatever legal reasons.

Not necessarily, several companies that utilize BSD like licenses have contributed back to the projects.

Two single points where I agree with you. But do americans protect their constitution? Or russians? Most of times, no Any legal act requires enforcement, nothing special.

You better believe Americans do protect their constitution as do Canadians with their Charter of Rights and Freedoms and defending those rights and freedoms usually have publicly funded departments to help defend those rights even if you cannot afford it personally.

I have no problem with the code using this license, I have problem when the amount of code using this license expands to the scale of whole kernel.
Reason?

Using educational centers as pets to empower their local research subdivision. Giving only portions of code back and separating it (by amount of effort and time needed to learn, by design, by market share, by patents) so that students actually learn and advance proprietary parts instead of collaborating with commercial sector on completely open basis.

The original free code is still free. If someone changes or adds onto it then that is their code to do with as they feel fit. If that means giving back in a public manner all the better but it should not be a requirement. It's the freedom of choice.

Slave 2nd class sheep feeding aristocratic wolves. Deanjo, you´re using and working for Apple.

I haven't worked for Apple for a few years now (going on three). In fact my current employer develops GPL software.

Why not *BSD? Cause *BSD is not good for desktop. And it cannot be done better for desktop, cause Apple doesn´t give much away, following their (BSD) license. Yet Apple took whole whoop of technology from them, for free. Professors carrying out development of their own system, on their own; sometimes getting pieces from the table and dreaming to work elsewhere. Awesome Sounds a lot like ReactOS, but in unix way

Yes Apple used BSD licensed code as the license clearly allows. The original authors of that code still offer that code to anyone.

You claimed I benefited from it in linux, you surely mean CUPS etc. But, don´t you claimed some months ago that CUPS sucks in linux? Cause, yes it prints, but it is hardly usable: the network functionality is not a problem - the problem is drivers, and CUPS or its license does not change anything. Kodak for example, does MacOSX drivers, but completely ignores linux. I´m proud to use HP <3, but yes I use alternative ink.

I wasn't even thinking of CUPS but that would be one example. Just look at your system and think, what is there that is BSD, PD, MIT licensed? Lets just look at SQLite for example which is a huge dependency for many open source projects. You probably have a dozen appliances alone that use it so don't try to pass the impression that those licenses only benefit the commercial guys. It benefits everybody. from coders to end users to developers.

[smitty3268]

Oh such as items like the offering that are out on a CDDL license just for example although there are many more. ZFS, dtrace, etc

CDDL is a bad example IMO. Sun specifically designed that license to be incompatible with the GPL because Linux was their main competition. If Linux had been licensed BSD, you can bet the CDDL would have been incompatible with that instead.

[crazycheese]

Oh such as items like the offering that are out on a CDDL license just for example although there are many more. ZFS, dtrace, etc

Deanjo, my friend, you had had so much fun explaining me what BSD allows to do (which I know), that you have drifted away from my original claim
Why would a company use other-than-linux kernel if they need most versatile *nix configuration?
And even if they love BSD, why on the earth close it down? I think I have already made points which no one denied.
Further, it is beyond my understanding why would Samsung need ZFS and dtrace on their phone?

Not necessarily, several companies that utilize BSD like licenses have contributed back to the projects.

This is not a scenario to get in 95% cases. On contrary this is scenario in GPL in 95% cases.
I´m unaware of any "contribute back" in BSD, except when they want some portion of code to be "outsourced for free development" and the company doing this, usually has the subject patented as additional protection.

You better believe Americans do protect their constitution as do Canadians with their Charter of Rights and Freedoms and defending those rights and freedoms usually have publicly funded departments to help defend those rights even if you cannot afford it personally.

Yeah, what I see is Mexico cartel war for 25 years in front of yer noises, yet you´re on quest for "democracy" against own-funded Taliban, based on very vague and barely researched 9/11.
Yer removing Kudafee which you have sponsored before under same claims of democracy and managed to drag whole Europe in you own financial balloon, made by privately held banks incl. Federal Reserve.
The us-corporation has complete control of your whole nation and the laws are corporate-friendly. Thanks to bringing software patents to Europe by the way.
40 years before, you could claim to have some democracy, but now you better please first look at yourself as nation, before telling others of their ideals.
But I give you one point valid, if US desides to go jackass, whole world will be dragged along.

The original free code is still free. If someone changes or adds onto it then that is their code to do with as they feel fit. If that means giving back in a public manner all the better but it should not be a requirement. It's the freedom of choice.

Freedom can not exist without its protection. Or all humans suddenly come initiate completely transparent society together.

I wasn't even thinking of CUPS but that would be one example. Just look at your system and think, what is there that is BSD, PD, MIT licensed? Lets just look at SQLite for example which is a huge dependency for many open source projects. You probably have a dozen appliances alone that use it so don't try to pass the impression that those licenses only benefit the commercial guys. It benefits everybody. from coders to end users to developers.

A lot is licensed under other-than-GPL in linux ecosystem, Yet I´m unaware of anything raw BSD-like to be useful for non-developer; its all in proprietary wrappers.
The BSD-sheep is perfect match for hungry wolves. The BSD-sheep can befriend GNU-gnu too, they can peacefully coexist together. But gnu´s primary difference and advantage is its HORNS to deal with lucrative proprietary wolves.

[bridgman]

1. Deanjo didn't live in the USA last time I looked.

2. The entire graphics stack is BSD-licensed (X11) and I wouldn't call it "developer only" or "proprietary only".

[crazycheese]

1. Deanjo didn't live in the USA last time I looked.

2. The entire graphics stack is BSD-licensed (X11) and I wouldn't call it "developer only" or "proprietary only".

1. He mentioned US to be democracy (while in reality I don´t think democracy exists anywhere on the planet), so ...

2.1. Licensing stack with BSD is good for AMD to take the features back into the proprietary driver. Which means amd effort is less opensource, but more opencore (primary reasons I departed myself from AMD equipment for unspecified amount of time); still AMD provides documentation and some developer input for its non-windows manifestation, hence BSD is not pure rip-off;but valid give-recieve with proprietary leaching allowed. Again, this case is way different with Samsung.

2.2. BSD-licensed gfx stack could be used in other OSes, that are not-so-GPL friendly, for whatever reasons. Like BSD itself and Haiku. Why these OSes prefer BSD instead of GPL is their own choice; but it does not get long away from the points I mentioned about whats possibly be reason for Samsung actions.

Why modern IT corporations are not basing their income solely on input they create in the projects (which would be perfect for GPL), instead of setting everything off as proprietary/public as landlords, is beyond my understanding.

[agd5f]

As for "big mess" with embedded GPUs - ARM (Mali), Imagination (PowerVR), Qualcomm (Adreno) all have GPL kernel drivers which is more than you can say about e.g. nVidia or AMD on the x86 front. (AMD supports developers of open driver, but don't provide any themselvs.)

AMD has several in house developers, including myself, that have done a large amount of the open source driver work.

[agd5f]

2.1. Licensing stack with BSD is good for AMD to take the features back into the proprietary driver. Which means amd effort is less opensource, but more opencore (primary reasons I departed myself from AMD equipment for unspecified amount of time); still AMD provides documentation and some developer input for its non-windows manifestation, hence BSD is not pure rip-off;but valid give-recieve with proprietary leaching allowed. Again, this case is way different with Samsung.

AMD didn't really have a preference on the license for the open source driver per se. The use of an X11 license came more from the fact that the existing drm and xorg ddx code were licensed X11 to begin with so we adopted the project licenses. Our goal is to sell hardware. One nice advantage the X11 license is that other smaller OSes (proprietary or open source) can use the X11 licensed driver code directly so it provides a nice reference for OSes that we are not able to support directly.

[mwendt]

AMD has several in house developers, including myself, that have done a large amount of the open source driver work.

my appologies, I stand corrected!

[crazycheese]

AMD didn't really have a preference on the license for the open source driver per se. The use of an X11 license came more from the fact that the existing drm and xorg ddx code were licensed X11 to begin with so we adopted the project licenses. Our goal is to sell hardware. One nice advantage the X11 license is that other smaller OSes (proprietary or open source) can use the X11 licensed driver code directly so it provides a nice reference for OSes that we are not able to support directly.

Yes, if AMD wanted to support all the platforms it had to go something near BSD (cause some platforms deny freedom protection) and using same license as X11 makes everything easier.
But in the case of samsung, there is no start for project, there is no programming of something completely new, there is just case of taking BSD code and closing it down.
It is as if samsung takes X11 and closes it down for own system. Bad for samsung & others (unless they giveback, but still bad) and exactly the case why GPL is better. Exactly the case why android is better.

I have a feeling that google will revoke samsung license forced by their actions, the smartphone market gets even more fragmented and then comes Elop2 and buys samsung mobile together with its bada.
I don´t understand why the heck samsung needs this, why not fork android?!