November 5th, 2009

New Epic 3D game engine toolset: Fabulous, fun, and free!

Posted by Ed Burnette @ 12:05 pm

Categories: Commercial, Community, Games, General, Licenses, Programming, Scripting

Tags: 3D, EPIC, Epic Games, Unreal Engine, Games, Personal Technology, Ed Burnette

This is big: Epic Games just announced the release of the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), a free edition of the Unreal Engine 3. It’s available to anyone interested in using 3D game engine technology, including game developers, students, hobbyists, researchers, creators of 3D visualizations.

The Unreal Engine is the technology behind popular PC and console games such as Gears of War, Unreal Tournament, Bioshock, Medal of Honor, Army of Two, and Batman: Archam Asylum. It’s one of the best game engines available today. See the UDK features page for more details on all of its capabilities.

Previously, if you wanted to use the Unreal Engine in your programs you had to enter into a very expensive agreement with Epic for access to the technology. A few years ago, Epic reportedly asked for up-front payments of as much as $8 million before your game was even developed! Now anyone can download the PC version of the UDK and immediately try it out without paying a cent or signing anything. As a former professional game developer, this is just amazing to me.

The Unreal community was going nuts this morning after the announcement. Some were shocked that Epic chose to release the entire engine and not just a crippled subset. As one poster put it,

“Man, one thing I hope you guys realize is that this is almost EXACTLY the engine build that we’re using here at Epic! You get every single feature that we’ve been using here that aren’t even in any games yet! We only got some of these features last week!”

Use of the new UDK is free for noncommercial purposes, but it can be licensed cheaply for commercial uses. For example you can use it to write a commercial PC video game and pay nothing up front and no royalties until your sales go over $5,000. See the licensing page for all the details. Currently, the free kit is only offered to PC users but Epic says console support is “under consideration”.

“Unreal Engine 3 has been used to create games in a wide range of genres, as well as military simulations, 3D architectural walkthroughs, animated movies and more,” said Epic VP Mark Rein. “Users are only limited by their imaginations. Go ahead, make something Unreal!”

Related articles:

• Epic Offers Free Unreal Engine 3 Dev Kit, New Licensing Deals
• North Carolina’s Research Triangle–“the hub of East Coast video games?”
• Never mind the recession, the Triangle computer gaming industry is booming

November 3rd, 2009

Skype open source? Ain't gonna happen

Posted by Ed Burnette @ 10:37 am

Categories: Commercial, Community, General, Licenses, Linux

Tags: Skype Technologies S.A., Linux, Open Source, Internet, Operating Systems, Software, Ed Burnette

The blogosphere was all a-twitter yesterday when rumors surfaced that Skype, the popular internet telephony application, would be released as open source “in the nearest future“. It turns out that Skype’s plans are not so grandiose, and even if they were, questions about who owns the code would prevent it from happening.

In a clarification posted today on Skype’s Linux blog, developer Stanislav Karchebny (aka berkus) wrote:

Yes, there’s an open source version of Linux client being developed. This will be a part of larger offering, but we can’t tell you much more about that right now. Having an open source UI will help us get adopted in the “multicultural” land of Linux distributions, as well as on other platforms and will speed up further development. We will update you once more details are available.

The key words here are “open source UI”. Oliver Faurax, who initially broke the story Monday, posted a Q&A on his site which explains:

Q. Will the protocol be open?

No. Berkus commented on my blog and on the Skype Linux blog that they will open the GUI code, and not the library. The most likely outcome is that they will provide a libskype closed binary library that will allow someone to communicate with a GUI.

One reason the library will not be open source is that Skype doesn’t, um, have the source. According to a lawsuit filed in September over Skype intellectual property,

An executable-only object code form of the GI Software was licensed by Joltid to Skype, a well-known Internet-based company that provides users throughout the world with free or low-cost telephone services over the Internet. Skype did not obtain a license to the GI Software source code, however, and the license it did obtain was terminated based on Skype’s breaches of the license agreement.

In other words, Skype doesn’t own their own core technology. If you believe Joltid, Skype is not even supposed to have the source code. Unless copyright holders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom (founders of Joltid) agree, Skype cannot change the license on that code and release it as open source. And given that Skype recently sold for $2 billion it’s not likely they’re going to hand it over for free.

Related articles:

• Skype plays footsie with open source

October 22nd, 2009

Stallman admits GPL flawed, proprietary licensing needed to pay for MySQL development

Posted by Ed Burnette @ 12:14 am

Categories: Commercial, Community, General, Licenses, Linux

Tags: GPL, MySQL, Richard Stallman, Stallman, Tools & Techniques, Open Source, Databases, Management, Enterprise Software, Software

Software freedom activist Richard Stallman and others are trying to block Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL. Why? Because MySQL is covered by the GNU Public License (GPL), and the purchase has exposed a flaw in the GPL that Stallman says will cause a “major setback” to the development of the free database if the acquisition is allowed to go through.

Under the GPL, the copyright holder (usually the author) has special privileges that no one else has: they can use the code in a proprietary product. In an open letter to the European Commission, Stallman admits that revenue from this proprietary licensing is necessary to fund development for the free version (emphasis added):

MySQL uses the parallel licensing approach to generate revenue to continue the FLOSS development of the software. If Oracle acquired MySQL, it would then be the only entity able to release the code other than under the GPL…. As only the original rights holder can sell commercial licenses, no new forked version of the code will have the ability to practice the parallel licensing approach, and will not easily generate the resources to support continued development of the MySQL platform.

The letter was signed by Richard Stallman and representatives from Knowledge Ecology International and the Open Rights Group.

Stallman’s position is exceptional when viewed against his long history of evangelizing Free (as in speech) software as the “morally correct choice” that trumps all other considerations. Compare the letter above with this sermon on his gnu.org web site:

Proprietary software developers have the advantage of money; free software developers need to make advantages for each other. Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it…. Proprietary software developers, seeking to deny the free competition an important advantage, will try to convince authors not to contribute libraries to the GPL-covered collection…. But we should not listen to these temptations, because we can achieve much more if we stand together.

We free software developers should support one another. By releasing libraries that are limited to free software only, we can help each other’s free software packages outdo the proprietary alternatives. The whole free software movement will have more popularity, because free software as a whole will stack up better against the competition.

Even if MySQL were owned by Oracle because of its purchase of Sun, the database would still be Free Software. Anyone could use the source code, build their own version, and distribute it to others. But finally Stallman has recognized that may not be good enough because somebody has to pay for this stuff. Score one for pragmatism over purity. Hallelujah.

(Photo illustration by Zack Whittaker)

April 16th, 2009

IBM passes open source license baton to Eclipse

Posted by Ed Burnette @ 12:47 pm

Categories: Commercial, Community, Eclipse, General, Java, Licenses, Patents, Programming

Tags: License, Eclipse, IBM Corp., Section 7, Eclipse Public License 1.0, Open Source, Java Development Tools, Development Tools, Software Development, Software/Web Development

IBM and the Eclipse Foundation have taken a stand against license proliferation by announcing today that the Common Public License (CPL) has been officially superseded by the Eclipse Public License (EPL). The CPL will no longer be considered an active open source license, but there’s an easy migration path for CPL code to transition to EPL.

Mike Milinkovich, executive director for life of the Eclipse Foundation (just kidding Mike) broke the news today in his blog. He writes:

License proliferation in open source is a real issue. It costs businesses to review multiple licenses, and the plethora of licenses can be confusing to someone starting a new open source project.

Over the past five years we have seen the Eclipse Foundation go from a good idea that might work to one of the most successful open source communities out there. We have seen the Symbian Foundation adopt the EPL as its license, thereby bringing a huge community and code base in its own right to the EPL, plus demonstrating the utility of the license well outside of the Java domain that it is best known in. More recently, Google also added the EPL as one of the licenses it supports on Google Code. It is clear that if we wanted to consolidate on one license, that the EPL made the most sense.

So what does this mean for projects such as Mondrian which are distributed under the CPL? Well, nothing has to happen — you can continue to use a dead license if you want. But because EPL has been denoted as the formal “successor version of the CPL” you can use a provision already in the CPL to switch. Section 7 says:

In addition, after a new version of the Agreement is published, Contributor may elect to distribute the Program (including its Contributions) under the new version.

EPL 1.0 is considered the “new version” of CPL 1.0 under OSI rules.

The two licenses were very close anyway. Other than their names and (previously) their Agreement Stewards, the only real difference was the way the patent license termination clause was written. That clause, which has never been invoked as far as I know, covers what happens in the event of a patent lawsuit. For more information on the relationship between the CPL and the EPL see the EPL FAQ.

Related articles:

• HOWTO: Pick an open source license (part 1)
• Google says no to license proliferation
• As Stallman looks on, Sun frees Java under the GPL
• Android will be 100% open source, says Google

June 4th, 2008

Patrick Brady dissects Android

Posted by Ed Burnette @ 12:03 am

Categories: Android, Community, General, Google, IO2008, Java, Licenses, Linux, Programming

Tags: Google Inc., Library, Hardware, Patrick Brady, Android, Bionic, Surfaces, Audio Flinger, Dalvik, Linux

Patrick Brady of Google’s partner group provided a detailed technical tour of the internals of the Android platform during his recent talk at Google I/O 2008 titled “Anatomy and Physiology of an Android”. Topics included Linux kernel enhancements, the Bionic library (Google’s slimmed down version of libc), Android functional and runtime libraries, native servers, and more.

[ Read: More coverage of Google I/O 2008 and Android. ]

Linux kernel

At its foundation, Android is based on Linux 2.6.4. Patrick said they would stay with that release until there was some reason to move. Google made a number of kernel enhancements for Android including: alarm, ashmem, binder, power management, low memory killer, kernel debugger, and logger. All the kernel enhancements have been contributed back to the community under the GNU Public License (GPL), so if you’re interested in looking at the code you can find the source repository at http://git.android.com .

Bionic library

Google developed a custom library for the C compiler (libc) called Bionic. This was necessary for three main reasons: Read the rest of this entry »

June 2nd, 2008

Android will be 100% open source, says Google

Posted by Ed Burnette @ 4:02 am

Categories: Android, Community, General, Google, IO2008, Licenses

Tags: Google Inc., Apache Software Foundation, Android, Open Source, Ed Burnette

Contrary to some reports, everything that makes Android “Android”, including all the core platform components and libraries needed to port Android to new devices will be open sourced under commonly used, industry standard licenses, says Google.

[ See also: Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform ]

What is open
I confirmed with three different Google employees at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco that the core Android platform will be 100% open source. Even multimedia codecs, which historically are held close to the vest will be open. Except where noted, everything will use the Apache software license (ASL v2). This is the same open source license used by projects like the Apache HTTP server, Tomcat, Harmony, and many other large projects in the open source community.

There are two exceptions to the Apache license rule:

1. Software that is already covered by by a free/open source license will continue to use that license. Most notably, this includes Google’s enhancements to the Linux kernel. Linux uses the GNU Public License (GPL v2) so enhancements to the kernel will use the same license.
2. Any software that touches Eclipse, for example the Eclipse Android Development Tools plug-in (ADT) will be licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL), because that’s what Eclipse uses.

What is not
Google chose the Apache license because it gives carriers, OEMs, and application developers the freedom to use whatever license they want for their own software. While Google encourages everyone to make their own code open if possible, it’s not required by the license. Even Google plans to make a few of their applications closed-source, including their GMail application. These programs are not part of the core Android system, even though they may be bundled with Android phones.

A Google employee I talked to felt the need to apologize for this. “We’re not holding it back for any nefarious purpose,” says Dick Wall on the Android team. “We’re simply not ready to publish the API that talks to the back end server.” This makes sense given Google’s extreme reluctance to be “stuck” with a poorly thought out API that they can’t support forever. This doesn’t preclude the company from opening up the source to those apps later.

Remember that up to now, all the software on your typical cell phone has been proprietary. With Android, carriers like Sprint and Cingular are free to use either open or closed source for any custom applications they install on their new Android phones. And of course, third party programs (like the ones you write) can be open or closed. It wouldn’t surprise me to see completely free/open distributions of Android which eschew any proprietary add-ons in favor of open source alternatives.

February 25th, 2008

Forget AMD, Intel should buy Nvidia

Posted by Ed Burnette @ 6:05 am

Categories: Games, General, Licenses, Patents

Tags: NVidia Corp., ATI Technologies Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Graphics, Intel Corp., AMD Stock, Mergers & Acquisitions, Chipsets, Investment, Finance

AMD stock is in the tank right now, so proposals have been circulating they might be an acquisition target. However this combination makes no sense to me, and it took me a while to figure out why. Intel should be the one buying, and they should be buying Nvidia.

Nvidia is basically a fab-less operation. They design the chips but outsource the manufacturing. Intel is king of the fabs. Nobody, with the possible exception of IBM, can touch their fab technology lead at this point in time.

Intel makes integrated graphics accelerators but they are universally panned in the reviews. They’re ok for spreadsheets and Solitaire, but if you want Unreal Tournament or Crysis, then you have to go with an add-on from ATI (AMD) or Nvidia. Despite the fact that most of the readers of this site probably have one already, the vast majority of computer users just make due with the integrated graphics. When AMD bought ATI enthusiasts hoped that the ATI graphics genes would find their way into AMD integrated chipsets, but it hasn’t happened yet. In fact one could argue that merger marked the beginning of AMD’s latest slide. Maybe an Intel/Nvidia merger would bear sweeter fruit.

Since AMD/ATI and Nvidia are the top two high end graphics card manufacturers, I imagine that there would be serioius anti-trust objections to any merger. By contrast, the product lines of Nvidia and Intel are complementary. And Nvidia has always had trouble getting official permission to work with Intel chipsets due to licensing issues. A merger would make those issues go away, giving the consumer more choice. Nvidia acquired some good talent and patents when it bought 3DFX; Intel could use that for its future plans and reduce the risk of lawsuits.

Finally, both Nvidia and ATI are working on novel techniques for massively multi-core computing. At SC07 “GPU computing” was all the rage. Using off the shelf hardware, programmers can get a 50x boost for certain scientific algorithms using the vector processors in a graphics card. Expect to see this trend continue, with 1,000 core engines available for a song later this year. Nvidia is the leader in this area. By teaming up with Nvidia, Intel could leap ahead of its rival and avoid some potentially nasty IP questions.

Intel and Nvidia are at the top of their games right now, so they both have high market caps on paper. A merger between Intel and Nvidia would be expensive, but from a technical and anti-trust point of view it makes a whole lot more sense than putting AMD/ATI and Nvidia together. What do you think?

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February 6th, 2008

"First among equals" undermines community, says Linus

Posted by Ed Burnette @ 11:11 am

Categories: Community, General, Java, Licenses, Linux, Sun

Tags: GPL, Linux, Open Source, UNIX, Operating Systems, Software, Ed Burnette

In an interview at the Linux Foundation, Linus Torvalds warned of commercial control of open source. Using Java and OpenSolaris as an example he pointed out that “Sun ends up having rights that nobody else has – even if they then act perfectly and they really behave well, just the fact that they have special rights makes people legitimately feel like they are second class citizens.”

The “special rights” he’s referring to come into play because a) a single commercial entity, in this case Sun, holds the copyright, and b) the license used, in this case GPL, does not give other users and developers the same rights as the copyright holder. The owner can use, or allow others to use, the code in ways the GPL prohibits. This gives the owner a competitive advantage and a source of revenue that nobody else can enjoy.

Fellow ZDNet blogger Dana Blankenhorn refers to this situation as “proprietary open source“.

“That’s not how you build a community,” says Linus, who uses a different model for the Linux kernel. “One of the things I did with Linux from very early on was when somebody sends me changes, they retain all copyright in those changes. I don’t have any more rights than anybody else,” he says. “Your rights when it comes to Linux are directly what you put into it.”

This does make some things harder, such as making changes to the license, he admitted. “There are rationalizations for why you have to assign copyrights to some and they may even be valid,” he says, “but it does undermine the community because it means that there is a first among equals.”

In related news, so far both Linus and the Free Software Foundation have declined to respond to “An Open Letter to Linus Torvalds“. Released on Martin Luther King’s birthday, one of the things the letter proposed was to change GPL to allow GPL and non-GPL code to be intermixed more freely. This would help level the playing field between code owners and everybody else.

January 21st, 2008

Software emancipation: An open letter to Linus Torvalds

Posted by Ed Burnette @ 4:50 pm

Categories: Community, General, Java, Licenses, Linux, Patents, Programming

Tags: Software, Linus Torvalds, GPLv2, RSS, Internet, Ed Burnette

[After years of watching the software industry twist itself in knots trying to differentiate "open" vs. "free" and having to re-invent code simply because it had the wrong comments at the top, I think it's time to put an end to the madness. This promoted me to write the following letter to Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel. -Ed]

Dear Linus,

Like you, I’m pragmatic, not dogmatic. I believe software wants to be used and shared, but licensing issues keep getting in the way. As an industry, we’re making this way too hard on ourselves. We’re wasting our energies on unproductive issues and unnecessary restrictions. Something’s got to give.

GPLv2, because of its ubiquity and common sense values, plays a central role in where we are today. It deserves a lot of credit, but it’s not without its flaws. GPLv3 started off trying to fix some of the problems but it became highly politicised and mixed up with the software equivalent of “social engineering”. Just look at the confusing distinction it makes between user and non-user products for example.

A license is no place for a political or social agenda. So I’ve got a radical idea I’d like you to consider:

Let’s fork the GPL itself, and come out with our own revision, say, “GPL version 2.2″[1], which would become the “real” successor to GPLv2.

Remember what happened to RSS[2]? RSS 1.0 came out but it was considerably different from RSS 0.91. So Dave Winer developed RSS 0.92 to carry on the 0.91 tradition. Eventually, RSS 2.0 grew out of RSS 0.92, making 1.0 an evolutionary dead end. GPLv2 is like RSS 0.91, and GPLv3 is like RSS 1.0. The new license could be the equivalent of RSS 0.92. And maybe someday there would be a GPLv4 which would be based on 2.2 not 3.0.

Some of the guiding principles of “v2.2″ could be:

• Unambiguously allow use of code in embedded devices (like TiVo).
• Unambiguously allow plug-ins, device drivers, and other add-ins to be covered by any license.
• Explicitly allow combinations with code in other licenses, but preserve the idea of giving back improvements.
• Grant enough patent rights to make contributions useful, while not pursuing an agenda.
• Make it short and sweet (v3 is too long and lawyerly).
• Respect the freedoms of programmers (and their code) too, not just users.

There are not many people who could pull this off; in fact you may be the only one. If you get behind it, others will follow.

So what do you think?

–Ed

[1] Since there was already an LGPLv2.1 I thought it’d be better to skip GPLv2.1 to avoid confusion. Of course, GPLv2.0 is copyrighted by the FSF so we’d have to write a new one from scratch.

[2] http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rssVersionHistory.html

November 5th, 2007

Google rejects GPL in new gPhone alliance

Posted by Ed Burnette @ 5:52 pm

Categories: Android, Apple, Community, Eclipse, Google, Java, Licenses, Programming

Tags: Google Inc., GPL, Alliance, Linux, Mobile, Java, Apache Software Foundation, Android, Advertising & Promotion, Open Source

Days after making waves in the nascent social networking pond with its OpenSocial initiative, Google just cannonballed into the much larger world of mobile phones. Today Google announced the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of over 30 technology and mobile companies, and Android, an open source software stack for mobile devices. A developer SDK for Android will be available on November 12th, and phones (gPhones?) that conform to the Android standard are expected in the second half of 2008.

Andy Rubin (of Sidekick fame), Director of Mobile Platforms at Google, says that the Android platform will include “an operating system, user-interface and applications — all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation.” The goal? “A better and faster pace for innovation that will give mobile customers unforeseen applications and capabilities.”

Under the covers, the new platform is built on the open Linux Kernel, created by Linus Torvalds. Linux is licensed under GPLv2, but the rest of Android will be covered by the Apache v2 license. From the FAQ:

Why did you pick the Apache v2 open source license?
Apache is a commercial-friendly open-source license. The Apache license allows manufacturers and mobile operators to innovate using the platform without the requirement to contribute those innovations back to the open-source community. Because these innovations and differentiated features can be kept proprietary, manufacturers and mobile operators are protected from the “viral infection” problem often associated with other licenses.

Android will use a publicly accessible repository, with module owners similar to how the Linux kernel is managed. However it will likely be a central repository hosted at Google.

Various Open Handset partners will be contributing parts of the new platform. For example,

• Ascender will provide a collection of fonts for use by the system and third party applications
• Nuance will provide the software to implement voice commands
• PacketVideo is contributing OpenCORE, software that supports music applications, video creation and playback, podcast services, and real-time streaming
• SONiVOX is contributing its audioINSIDE technology, which includes General MIDI instrument sets, audio codecs and effects, interactive game audio (think DirectMusic without Microsoft), and ringtones

One question that remains unanswered at this point is how developers will program the platform, i.e., what language they will use. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz congratulated Google on “their new Java/Linux phone platform, Android”. The web pages for Android say that the system “utilizes a custom virtual machine that has been designed to optimize memory and hardware resources in a mobile environment”, and that sounds like Java. But if Java is part of the equation, it almost certainly won’t be from Sun because Sun’s mobile Java stack is all GPL. Perhaps they’re planning to include Harmony, the Apache-licensed open source implementation of Java that has yet to be used anywhere outside of a few demonstration projects.

My guess is that the platform will be primarily programmed in C, with Java (and other languages) as an option. The inclusion of Wind River as an alliance partner points to C, since they market a commercial Eclipse-based C development system and Google says that tools will be included. Another partner, Esmertec, says that “Beyond Open Source of Android, Esmertec’s leading edge Jbed Java Virtual Machine (JVM) platform can easily be made commercially available per customer request for the Alliance ’s mobile platform.” Jbed lets you run standard Java ME applications, but it’s not open source.

Some have speculated that Apple might support Android on the iPhone. I think that’s unlikely given that the iPhone is based on MacOSX which has its own unique programming interfaces. Apple’s XCode tools are based on Objective-C, which almost nobody but Apple uses any more. Maybe eventually virtual machines will make their way to handsets, and you’ll be able to have Windows CE, PalmOS, Android/gPhone, Symbian, and MacOS/iPhone, running at the same time. Not that you’d really want to.