Bruce Perens responds to Ari Jaaksi

Posted by Ken Y-N on June 19th, 2008 at 01:28pm

Following up on Dr Ari Jaaksi asking the Linux community for understanding, Bruce Perens, a leader in the Free Software and Open Source communities, had this to say in response to Dr Jaaksi’s statement that:

“There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models.”

Basically, Mr Perens thinks that Nokia are barking up the wrong tree. He says what needs to be considered is drawing bright lines in the system:

That’s a legal term, and in this case it means a line between the Free Software and the rest of the system, that is “bright” in that the two pieces are very well separated, and there is no dispute that one could be a derivative work of the other, or infringes on the other in any way. All of the Free Software goes on one side of that line, and all of the lock-down stuff on the other side.

Interestingly, he also adds:

To build a bright-line system, you need an effective partnership between your legal team and engineering.

That’s a very interesting statement!

So, what does this all mean for the Trusted Computing Group and from Nokia’s point of view, the Mobile Trusted Module? A hardware MTM (or Trusted Platform Module) can be used by an open source kernel or application, and virtualisation should work too, but the MTM specification also includes a secure booting procedure and run-time integrity checks.

Read his full article on the Technocrat web site here.

Tags: ari jaaksi, bruce perens, nokia, open source, technocrat