Sony's PlayStation 4 Is Running Modified FreeBSD 9

[Ericg]

And really, if you think about it.. if you want to talk about stealing, the GPL is actually more akin to stealing.

If you have a BSD project "A." Company "B" comes along, takes the project, makes some modifications, and releases the binary... their work stays private. But they can't close up the project itself. No matter what the company does, Project A will always exist, that code will always be out there, the only thing that ISNT out there are the changes that Company B paid for.

If you have a GPL Project "A." Company "B" Comes along, makes some modifications to the project and then releases the binary.. the GPL states that EVERYTHING has to be open source so that others can benefit from it. Thats fine and dandy and really helpful, don't get me wrong, but then the community benefits from work it didn't do and didn't pay for. The company bore the financial burden and the burden-of-time.

[Emmanuel Deloget]

D3D11-like. The native API is much lower-level than is possible on the varying hardware of a PC. It's designed similar to the D3D11 way of doing things, sorta like how Gallium3D is, plus some direct shader and debugging facilities not possible without using a fixed hardware target. This is akin to how the XBox360 was "D3D9.5" as the fixed hardware target provided many affordances that PCs cannot. There is an almost 100% compatible D3D11 wrapper for the PS4 API to make porting easier, of course. Google is your friend. More specific details than those available online are still under NDA as of this time.

It is, put bluntly, fucking ridiculous to think that any major console would run OpenGL. As PC-centric as pure D3D is, OpenGL is significantly worse in terms of adding abstraction over the hardware itself, and only barely reflects (and only if you use the latest GL 4.3) how modern GPU hardware works. GL is only regaining any popularity because iOS and Android give you zero choice and shove it down your throat. If they offered something similar to D3D11 I'd bet a large wad of cold, hard cash that GL would again be relegated to the dusty niche it occupied in the years between the release of D3D8 and the release of the iPhone.

No offense intended, but I'm painfully trying to sort out your comment in order to find a real argument. 3D hardware is not Windows centric (may I recall you that it's also used on Mac, and OpenGL on Mac works just fine, thanks). The hardware is generic by iteself (otherwise you would have a large difference of performance on OpenGL platforms vs. DirectX platforms - and that's not the case). All 3D hardware I know is supposed to work that way (more or less) :

• prepare a DMA buffer containing a command stream
• send the DMA buffer to the hardware, which then execute it.

This is not different from any other device. Would you say that since Linux is more network-centric than Windows, it must mean that the network hardware is designed for Linux first? I serioulsy doubt it.

Now, for other fun facts :

• last time I checked, every single feature of the lastest NVIDIA boards were usable both via OpenGL and via D3D11. Which means that OpenGL is indeed at the same level than D3D11.
• last time I checked, the port of L4D2 on Linux was faster than the existing D3D code on Windows. Which means that the OpenGL state machine is not that slow compared to the D3D state machine.
• last time I checked, D3D was still a pure MS thing (may I recall you that MS retain full control over it, including the possibility to fully abandon it as it did with many technology before that?). It's not that iOS or Android doesn''t give you any choice. It's more that Microsoft dit not authorize anyone to port D3D on any other platform but Windows (not to mention that this port would be completely useless without an equivalent port of the DCOM subsystem on which D3D is built).
• last time I checked, the D3D11 compatibility layer for the PS4 was built by a thirs party company. Not by Sony. This work was possible because the shader language seems to be similar to HLSL - but then, shaders are compiled either at runtime or at build time, so in the end you end up with a command stream which is sent to the GPU. The shader syntax is not relevant to the underlying API - it's a mere convention. For more info about the D3D11 layer, see here : http://paradox3d.net/blog/direct3d11-ps4.html.
• last time I checked, Gallium3D was API agnostic. It's not designed like D3D - it's designed to minimize the workload of the caller, be it OpenGL or D3D or anything else. To minimize such work, it give the several abstractions which are designed to be hardware friendly (and given the fact that some GPU in the ARM world are really, really weird, I tend to believe that this abstraction will probably break in the future). The Direct in Direct Rendering Manager and Direct Rendering Infrasttructure has nothing to do with DirectX (not to mention that even if the DirectX design inspired the developpers when they started the project, D3D10 and 11 have a completely different architecture ; a full architecture change was the primary goal of D3D10)

It seems to me that either you miss some information or you failed to properly organize your discourse. Either way, put bluntly, you're comment is as useful as an orc in the Middle Earth.

[mrugiero]

And really, if you think about it.. if you want to talk about stealing, the GPL is actually more akin to stealing.

If you have a BSD project "A." Company "B" comes along, takes the project, makes some modifications, and releases the binary... their work stays private. But they can't close up the project itself. No matter what the company does, Project A will always exist, that code will always be out there, the only thing that ISNT out there are the changes that Company B paid for.

If you have a GPL Project "A." Company "B" Comes along, makes some modifications to the project and then releases the binary.. the GPL states that EVERYTHING has to be open source so that others can benefit from it. Thats fine and dandy and really helpful, don't get me wrong, but then the community benefits from work it didn't do and didn't pay for. The company bore the financial burden and the burden-of-time.

I don't think any of those is stealing. As company 'B', you are not forced to use the GPL code you didn't paid for to start, so it's just a take and give. If you don't want to give, you could as well start your work from scratch. If you want to use the previous work others paid or did (which might or might not involve other companies), then you have to release the work you paid, too. Because the ones who did your base wanted this take and give to be enforced.
The point is, the same way no one forces you to use a BSD license in what you code if you want it to keep it free, no one forces you to use GPL code, so if you want your work to remain only yours, you can just write your own software with your own license.
Enough with the stealing accusations, everyone?

[Ericg]

I don't think any of those is stealing. As company 'B', you are not forced to use the GPL code you didn't paid for to start, so it's just a take and give. If you don't want to give, you could as well start your work from scratch. If you want to use the previous work others paid or did (which might or might not involve other companies), then you have to release the work you paid, too. Because the ones who did your base wanted this take and give to be enforced.
The point is, the same way no one forces you to use a BSD license in what you code if you want it to keep it free, no one forces you to use GPL code, so if you want your work to remain only yours, you can just write your own software with your own license.
Enough with the stealing accusations, everyone?

I wasn't trying to make a super serious point with that Mrugiero, I knew it wasn't going to win this argument over haha. You're right though, no one forces you to use any license, you are free to pick whatever you want. And if no existing project meets your technical and legal requirements then you are free to start your own in-house with your exact technical specifications and release it under any license you want.

[mrugiero]

That's what I've trying to tell idiots like Erig and other all a long.

BSD has no advantages over Linux. There is simply no reason or excuse to use BSD to replace the BSD license with your own (AND YES YOU CAN DO THAT).

-Linux is way faster then FreeBSD or DragonflyBSD (see phoronix benckmarks)
-Linux is far more secure then OpenBSD (http://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/...ty-of-openbsd/ and http://www.seifried.org/security/os/...bsd-linux.html)
-Linux is far more portable then NetBSD (http://www.kroah.com/log/2004/09/29/#more_archs)
-Linux is far more stable then all BSDs
-Linux is far more reliable then all BSDs (see BSD USB problem)
-Linux is far more tested in real life situations then all BSDs
-Linux has far more software then BSD
-Linux has far more free drivers that work properly then BSD which only works with proprietary drivers like NVidia
-Linux supports and works far more modern hardware then BSD
So on....

That matter of fact is that there is nothing that can be done better on BSD then on Linux. Linux does everything better then BSD. Case closed.

So what? There's no discussion here about which is technically better, but about licenses.
And if this is about my post of giving advantage, it's still valid. The same technically inferior code is the one Sony starts off, it doesn't magically becomes better because they use it, so it doesn't help 'proprietary software to succeed' anymore than it helps free software to succeed, nor any less. If they do have something better than Linux, Linux could just fork the feature and adapt it as GPL, the same way Sony can. Exactly the same for both. And if it doesn't, then you have nothing to worry about BSD programmers making their (according to you) crappy software able for proprietary use.

[D0pamine]

This is whats wrong with BSD licensed software in general. It allows companies to just take and take and give nothing back but a locked down system.

100% correct!

EDIT: isn't the BSD licence just the GPL Version 0.1 ?

screw you i'm nicking your hard work and calling it my own!

[mrugiero]

I wasn't trying to make a super serious point with that Mrugiero, I knew it wasn't going to win this argument over haha. You're right though, no one forces you to use any license, you are free to pick whatever you want. And if no existing project meets your technical and legal requirements then you are free to start your own in-house with your exact technical specifications and release it under any license you want.

Oh, sorry.

You are wrong, the first scenario is stealing because Company B benefits from work they didn't do and never paid for it.

No. When you willingly, without any coercion, give it to anyone and everyone, it's not stealing, it's gifting.

[Awesomeness]

This was an old DevKit, not the final product. They could have shipped Grub2 just as a band-aid while they worked on their own Bootloader. Now, if they prove that the final version ships with Grub2 THEN you've got a case.

FreeBSD does not come with any GPLv3 software, including Grub. It ships some other bootloader. It would mean that Sony chose Grub 2.0 on purpose, leaving the default FreeBSD bootloader as well as the one they use in their Android phones behind.
No, that's sounds unlikely.

If they can leak screenshots, they can leak a disk image.

[Ericg]

Oh, sorry.

Don't worry about

No. When you willingly, without any coercion, give it to anyone and everyone, it's not stealing, it's gifting.

Truth. BSD license is giving every person, company, entity on the planet a no-strings-attached gift in the form of code. You do that willfully and KNOWING that it may be in a closed source product down the line, and you are okay with it. It can't be stealing if the person choosing the license is okay with that, or even encourages that.

EDIT: Useless, if I come over to your house and you say "Make yourself at home, have a beer if ya want, they're in the fridge." And I drink one of those said beers.... you can't then sue me for stealing a beer. You told me it was okay if I took it.

BSD license works the same way.

[ninez]

If anyone is actually interested (not that this applies to the PS4, specifically), but Sony uses lots of GPL/LGPL/GPL2, BSD (and other) licensed code, and use Linux in a slew of products as well...They seem to be respecting licenses (well, appear to 'now' anyway - since the 2007 debacle) and provide source code through their "Open Source Code Distribution Service" found here;

https://products.sel.sony.com/opensource/

and linux-related stuff here;

http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/common/search.html

a little O.T, but nonetheless i thought someone may have been interested.