Brian E.

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  1. The current state of affairs are disappointing, but I kinda saw this coming. The only real business model here is one of support and that looks to be all but officially gone now... There were many reasons I wanted to make sure the driver source was released (as seen in the GPL thread), primarily for moral and legal reasons, but also because I feared Tom would perform another disappearing act and we'd never get to see the source. Anyway, I spent some time looking at the driver source trying to figure out how it worked and what would be involved making it hardware agnostic. I was able to get it compiled and "working" on my gentoo system, but I never got to the point where I could manage an array with it. The driver is written in a very non-generic way. It's obvious Tom never intended to make the driver open source and it's built to work only with his "proprietary" management tools. For example, you have to load the driver with the list of devices in the array (because there's no persistent store for a config file...) and all the management is done through a /proc interface rather than ioctls. Oh, and for the record, I don't own any UnRaid products. I've never seen any of the management tools, only the /usr/src/linux-2.4.31 tree as was sent to me by another member here. I was also curious of the effort required in porting the UnRaid driver to the 2.6 kernel. Unfortunately, porting the driver to 2.6 would be a massive undertaking that I have neither the skills or time for. My suggestion would be getting the source code in the hands of some real kernel developers and see if any want to support the concept. My guess is that it would be better (more appropriate?) to make "unraid" a device-mapper target. But you might have a hard time keeping the "standard filesystem" feature where you can just pull out an UnRaid drive today and stick it in any Linux box with reiserfs support and read the drive... I dunno. I also have a hard time believing you'll see any performance improvements with the driver in the 2.4 kernel simply because of the single shared I/O queue and scheduler limitations. The 2.6 kernel makes huge improvements in these areas which should provide for better concurrent read/write performance. I'm a HUGE fan of the the UnRaid concept and I'm happy to provide assistance where and when I can on any completely open-source fork of this product, but my time is extremely limited these days. So get busy, Joe -Brian
  2. Umm, my response was to your gross generalizations and here you're doing it again. I don't think it's fair to say those that "support the GPL", "the slashdot crowd", or whatever are the same people who disregard the DMCA and break DRM. My point was it's ridiculous to make such a general claim. I don't see anywhere in this thread where somebody argued that the DMCA and/or DRM shouldn't apply to them. What inconsistencies and hypocrisies did you see by the people posting in this thread? I also don't remember claiming you don't support the GPL. How exactly am I being a hypocrite again? Maybe my first post was a bit pompus, but I think I fully explained why in my second and third posts. I had also been following the threads over at avsforum about Tom's disappearance and complete abandonment of his product except for taking orders. I probably read into his actions as a way to continue ignoring the requirements of the GPL. I don't need to repeat BLKMGK's spot on explanation above, but that is why I was out of patience. As soon as Tom decided to distribute modified GPL code he should have included source to those modifications along with licensing info. He's a smart guy so I'm sure he was aware of that. Really? I guess I misunderstood what you meant when you said, "those that care so much about the legalities of licensing terms of GPL totally disregard the validity of the licensing restrictions used by the MPAA and the RIA. [sic]. OK, but I'm still not sure what the legalities of the DMCA has to do with this topic...
  3. Looks like a lot has happened in the last couple of weeks... Wow... comparing those that want to see the GPL honored to DMCA/DRM supporters and then making the claim that those who care about enforcing the GPL are movie and music pirates?? Talk about your straw-man arguments... this is just ridiculous. Well, thanks Joe L. and BLKMGK for bringing back some sanity to the topic. And thanks to Tom for doing what sounds like the Right Thing tm ! Now would someone (even you Tom! ) like to tar up and send me the contents of their /usr/src/linux directory? PM me if you're willing, and I'll give you my email address. It shouldn't be more than a few K. The only reason I'm making this request is because I don't suppose lime-tech will post it for download anytime soon (if ever). And that's fine, but I'd like to take a look at it and possibly hack on it a bit. Oh and before anyone has a coronary and calls me a pirate, I'll quote section 6 of the GPL(v2): In other words, it's perfectly OK to distribute the source code provided by lime-tech.
  4. Granted, I was rather succinct in my initial posts, but that's because this has all been covered over at avsforum and the question was really directed to lime-tech. It wasn't intended to be a discussion of wether they've violated the GPL or not. So let me try to be as clear as possible: lime-technology (Tom) has already admitted to violating the GPL, and as required by the GPL, has promised to release the source of their modifications to any corresponding GPL code. Even if the un-raid module has been completely re-written (ie. clean-room implementation) without being derived from linux kernel sources (.../drivers/md/{md.c,xor.c}, and others?) lime-tech is still obligated to make the sources to the GPL binaries included on the flash drive available. Now, remember, not once did I say lime-tech should give their product away for free. Of course they're entitled to charge as much as they want for the flash drive. The GPL is quite clear about making the distinction between free as in speech and free as in beer. The GPL is in place so that software (based on other GPL code) that is distributed (ie. sold for a fee or given away) be kept free, as in speech. See, Joe gets it. You've got a better understanding of the GPL than most. Oh, and PGPFan: Calling someone a Nazi for simply asking lime-tech (Tom) to keep their word and comply with the licence their product is built on is totally out of line. Your complete and utter ignorance of the subject in question becomes more and more obvious with every post you make. Please try to find something constructive or relevent to say rather than the typical uninformed fanboy ramblings. Thanks.
  5. That's great... the first step in solving the problem is understanding it. But according to posts over at avsforum, you've understood the requirements of the GPL for quite some time now. From your actions, you appear to be ignoring those requirements, but, as you can see, that doesn't make them go away. According to this http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=6500421&post6500421 you said: That was exactly 4 months ago. Hopefully you can understand the lack of patience in my tone... So I'll ask the question again. When can we expect the driver source to be available?
  6. GPL compliance should be your number one priority. When can we expect to see some sources posted?