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UC Berkeley's Lawyers Blocking RISC-V in GCC
- alrs 10y agoDear Regents of the University of California: Could you guys someday learn to get out of your own way?
- blackguardx 10y agoWell, I think most organizations would be uncomfortable handing over their IP rights to third parties. Didn't the FSF make an exception to this rule for another developer? Also, why can't they use Clang/LLVM? That uses the BSD license as far as I know.
- justincormack 10y agoThere is risc-v support for llvm too, but they want it to be upstream in gcc too, as lots of things use or need gcc.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoUC does not really have IP rights under the CA Constitution. At least, not any right that prevents a person from speaking freely. UC cannot enforce copyright, NDAs, or other restrictions of speech. I think there is a very good argument that UC is unable to enforce (or even hold) a patent. > Article 1, Section 2 (a). Sentence 2 http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/.const/.article_1 http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/.const/.article_1
- blackguardx 10y agoThen why is there such a big battle over CRISPR patents?
- jsprogrammer 10y agoI'm not familiar with the case, but UC has acted outside the Constitution in the past.
- Lerc 10y agoCan they not exploit IP by transferring rights to another entity? If they cannot transfer rights to another entity then it's going to be tricky for them to do it for the fsf.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoHow can they transfer rights they do not have?
- jcranmer 10y agoThe citation you provided does not constitute evidence for any of your claims. Copyright is not related to freedom of speech or of press.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoCopyright is a restriction on both speech and press. And, it would be occurring by a Trust established by the CA Constitution if UC ever enforced such a restriction. Which is prohibited.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> Copyright is a restriction on both speech and press. Were that so, it would be prohibited by the First Amendment. The California state protection of speech from government interference has similar scope, and does not prohibit copyrights, nor does it prohibit the state or subordinate public entities of or within the state from either enforcing state copyright law (which exists) or exercising copyrights that they own.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoThe California Constitution is extremely clear. No one may restrict the freeness of anyone's speech and especially not any law. If UC uses its lawful property ownership powers (or any other) to restrict someone's speech, it has acted contrary to the CA Constitution.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoI'll just leave this here. >CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION >ARTICLE 1 DECLARATION OF RIGHTS >SEC. 2. (a) Every person may freely speak, write and publish his or her sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of this right. A law may not restrain or abridge liberty of speech or press.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoDo you have any other links supporting this claim, such as court decisions.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoCheck out Article 9, Section 9: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/.const/.article_9 http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/.const/.article_9 I'm not sure of any court decisions. Someone would need to be restricted by the University and challenge it to produce a case. I don't know if that has happened yet.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoAre you sure that link says what you think it does? """ (f) The Regents of the University of California shall be vested with the legal title and the management and disposition of the property of the university and of property held for its benefit and shall have the power to take and hold, either by purchase or by donation, or gift, testamentary or otherwise, or in any other manner, without restriction, all real and personal property for the benefit of the university or incidentally to its conduct; provided, however, that sales of university real property shall be subject to such competitive bidding procedures as may be provided by statute. Said corporation shall also have all the powers necessary or convenient for the effective administration of its trust, including the power to sue and to be sued, to use a seal, and to delegate to its committees or to the faculty of the university, or to others, such authority or functions as it may deem wise. """
- jsprogrammer 10y agoYes. What is the purpose of that wall of text you pasted?
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoIntellectual Property is not real property but it's still property.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> UC does not really have IP rights under the CA Constitution. Yes, it does. IP is a subset of personal property (more specifically, a subset of intangible personal property) and the Regents of the University of California have the "power to take and hold, either by purchase or by donation, or gift, testamentary or otherwise, or in any other manner, without restriction, all real and personal property for the benefit of the university or incidentally to its conduct". Art. IX, Sec. 9(f). [0] [0] http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/.const/.article_9 http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/.const/.article_9
- jsprogrammer 10y agoUC cannot restrict speech, so the fact that something is its property is merely the formality of the public's ownership.
- notalaser 10y agoA university is not "most organizations".
- blackguardx 10y agoHow do you think US universities make their money these days? A lot of it comes from IP.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Esau 10y agoWhich is really annoying if they are funded, even partially, by the government.
- rayiner 10y agoJust because a VC funds your company, should it own everything you make? And the government encourages the practice. Both because it reduces funding requirements, and because it creates an incentive for professors and students to take the IP and commercialize it.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh–Dole_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh–Dole_Act
- wolfgke 10y agoWhere is the difference between transferring copyright to the FSF and selling IP (including transferring copright) to some commercial vendor?
- Ar-Curunir 10y agoNot exactly the university's fault if state keeps cutting funding.
- hedora 10y ago
- legulere 10y agoThe LLVM risc-v backend is currently getting reimplemented by Alex Bradbury: http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-August/103748.html http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-August/103748....
- asb 10y agoThanks for the note. I've got a lightning talk at the upcoming November LLVM Dev meeting where I'll give an update (and should be refreshing my patches and updating on the llvm mailing list the next few days). Sadly the proposal Colin Schmidt and I put together for a RISC-V Birds of a Feather session was rejected, but I imagine there'll still be an informal discussion between a group of interested people on the "corridor track".
- erichocean 10y ago> the proposal Colin Schmidt and I put together for a RISC-V Birds of a Feather session was rejected Wow, that's lame.
- gnufx 10y ago[See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html#noip https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html#noip concerning "IP", and https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html (by a lawyer) concerning copyright assignment. Note the obligations on the FSF in the assignment contract.] Organizations that design(ed) CPUs with copyright papers on file with the FSF for GCC include AMD, ARM, IBM, Intel, MIPS, and Sun; others include Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung. The licence involved is orthogonal to copyright assignment.
- rwmj 10y agoThis is annoying because it's one of several things that stops Fedora/RISC-V from going into Fedora proper, but I'm sure it'll be sorted out. Edit: To save anyone asking, here are the other things we're waiting on: * Upstreaming of glibc, kernel and binutils changes. * Availability of rackable server hardware - required so we can deploy builders in the Fedora datacenter. This is obviously the biggest blocker, and likely several years away. In the interim I'm running my own build server which is currently doing a mass rebuild, but once that is finished will pick packages from the Fedora primary architecture builders and rebuild them for riscv64 (https://fedorapeople.org/groups/risc-v/ https://fedorapeople.org/groups/risc-v/) * Upstreaming of qemu changes (happening at the moment). Not a requirement, but nice to have.
- tbirdz 10y agoIs having physical RISC-V hardware required, or would using an fpga-based risc-v cpu or a risc-v emulator be acceptable?
- mynameislegion 10y agoThe qemu support for RISC-V is being upstreamed right now and there is also the Spike RISC-V simulator that you can use. There are various soft CPUs that can be run in FPGAs too.
- tbirdz 10y agoThanks for giving some specific examples of risc-v emulators. I was curious if using an fpga or emulator based solution (assuming it could fit in a rack enclosure) would be acceptable for the Fedora team, or if they wanted actual bare-metal risc-v hardware.
- asb 10y agoQEMU on modern x86 is going to give _much_ better performance than an FPGA.
- 10y ago
- pawadu 10y agoHow much work are we talking about here? Is it possible to do a clean-room implementation with reasonable effort?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 10y agoMight a fix be to lobby the California state legislature to assign copyright through statute?
- asb 10y agoI discussed this issue with a GCC developer at the LLVM Cauldron in Hebden Bridge a few weeks ago. He pointed out that although it's understandable the UC Berkeley regents balk at the idea of exclusive copyright assignment, the terms of the assignment do allow you to receive non-exclusive rights back with a 90 day notice period. Why it's structured in that way I'm not sure. I would hope there's a legal reason relating to the FSF's ability to fight copyright infringement, rather than a simple desire to discourage dual licensing.
- davexunit 10y agoCopyright assignment is done so that FSF has the standing to sue for GPL violations.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> Copyright assignment is done so that FSF has the standing to sue for GPL violations. Were they are a licensee authorized to make and redistribute a derivative work, they would have standing to sue for violations of the copyright on the derivative. Copyright assignment is not necessary for the FSF to have standing to sue for violations of the copyright on GCC when it incorporates the UCB-owned code. Copyright assignment does, however, prevent UCB from having standing to sue for violations -- and I think making the FSF's standing exclusive is exactly the point.
- bonzini 10y ago> Copyright assignment is not necessary for the FSF to have standing to sue for violations of the copyright on GCC when it incorporates the UCB-owned code. No, but copyright assignment is necessary for the FSF to have standing to sue on UCB-owned code (not just on derivatives), without any approval or collaboration from UCB and bypassing any discussion (whether in court or outside) on "how much" of the code the FSF owns. Making FSF's standing exclusive is not the point; making FSF autonomous is.
- kazinator 10y agoTrue; but it's not only that, I think. It simply eliminates the general problem of a GNU project being a patchwork of individual copyrights from individual contributors. Even if those individual contributors say they are putting their piece under the GPL, in fact they might not have the right to do so. Part of the process is getting some affidavit from employers that they don't claim rights over the contributor's work on the project. They are worried about a situation like: someone suddenly coming forward and and claims that some significant piece that was added to some GNU project five years ago (and has grown in scope since then) is actually their proprietary IP.
- wodencafe 10y agoImagine all the good we developers and artists could do, if there weren't so many goddamn lawyers in the way.
- phkahler 10y agoIsn't that code derived from GPLed code? In that case it must have a GPL license, so what are the lawyers really hung up on with copyright assignment? It's not like they can change the license due to owning the copyright, and they can't prevent anyone else using the code they've already released under that license. I guess I can see the frustration - at this point the actual ownership is kind of a minor point.
- legulere 10y agoYes the code is under GPL. The FSF wants copyright assigned to it, because that allows them to sue people that infringe the GPL [1]. This assignment is the precondition for the code to get included into GCC, but which the lawyers at Berkley don't seem to be so fond of. Owning the copyright also allows you to dual license the code under different licenses. That's not really the issue here with the FSF, but it's one of the many good reasons not to assign copyright to other entities. [1]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html
- theandrewbailey 10y agoThanks for pointing this out. I remember reading somewhere that a GPL license means that the creator still holds copyright (even though the work can be used by anyone). Having to assign copyright to the FSF gave me a WTF. This clears it up.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> The FSF wants copyright assigned to it, because that allows them to sue people that infringe the GPL But that's not at all true: they can sue people that violate the copyright on the derivative work incorporating the UCB-owned code (or code derived from it in the future) if they are properly licensed to create a distribute derivative works, which have their own copyright. Assignment just means UCB loses the right to sue over violations of the copyright, and the FSF's right to sue becomes exclusive -- which also gives FSF stronger negotiating power in settling lawsuits, since otherwise settling with the FSF would potentially leave others with legal claims.
- ucaetano 10y agoShouldn't the title be "FSF blocking RISC-V in GGC unless UC Berkeley hands over copyright"?
- cwyers 10y agoRight. UC Berkeley is following the letter and the spirit of the GPL here.
- ucaetano 10y agoActually, it is, GPL doesn't in anyway imply mandatory handover of copyrights to a 3rd party.
- _chris_ 10y agoYup, the problem is that Berkeley's dev work is funded by public money, which means they can't vacate their "ownership", because it's the public's.
- bonzini 10y agoThe FSF has received copyright assignments or disclaimers in the past from a lot of universities. It shouldn't be an issue.
- CalChris 10y agoI went to Berkeley and I still drop by to sit in on lectures. The IP department has always been terrible to deal with. They really are the opposite of Stanford with regards to IP. A pain to deal with, everything up front. Very hostile to startups. This probably puts SiFive in limbo. They (the IP dept) lost a first rate EE prof (Howe) over nonsense like this. Their glory days of the BSD lawsuit are long over.
- imglorp 10y agoI wonder if there's statistics somewhere listing schools vs how many tech spinoffs they've created, and where the various tech schools rank on that.
- mankash666 10y agoPort to clang. Lawyer friendly and practical license