They just pirated my open source 8088 BIOS | Hacker News Reader

They just pirated my open source 8088 BIOS

arstechnica.com

223 pointsjustsomehnguy136 comments

It might be that in China there's not a strong opensource culture. Here's a video from Naomi Wu dragging umidigy into compliance where she talks about the issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj04MKykmnQ

Chinese culture doesn’t respect intellectual property in general, why would they treat open source licenses any differently?

Those computers took a fairly significant effort to design, source components, and run through manufacturing. You'd think at some point they'd be self aware enough that the open source they're adulterating also required similar levels of gratis effort and should be afforded some respect.

If you looking into Chinese culture [1][2], it is astonishingly autocratic. Creativity is frowned on, and criticizing superiors is nearly impossible. There is a very strong "do what is asked, no questions" attitude. Business has very strong "nothing matters once I have your money" policy. I took South East Asian history in college, and Chinese culture is abundantly self-sabotaging. It was morbidly fascinating, which is why I took several courses on it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@serpentza [2] https://www.youtube.com/@laowhy86

> Business has very strong "nothing matters once I have your money" policy.

Western business now has adopted "nothing matters once I got your personal data" policy though. It seems that "nothing matters" policy is not restricted to Asia.

Opening up to China has not made that country more Western, it could be argued it has made the world more Chinese.

See also: VCs talking glowingly about how "productive" 996 makes Chinese companies and how US employees should be working similar hours to keep up.

Greed knows no national boundaries, and the societal norms that kept it somewhat under control in the West are being rapidly eroded.

I cringe when I see the term "Western" vis-a-vis countries in East Asia. How does it sound if we say "modern"? That sounds better to me. Why? Then, it includes Korea, Japan, and Taiwan -- all very modern, but not at all "Western".

I agree with your sentiment, but the collective delusion to open up to China was not an attempt to make it more modern. It truly was an attempt to westernize it. In the colonial, racist sense. The Allied powers wanted to westernize Japan and Korea as well after the second world war.

Makes me wonder how much innovation would the west see again if only we got rid of IP lawyers

Case law, at least in England and Wales, is on the side of whoever makes something out of disused or dormant designs and patents. The equitable ruling will always be made in favour of the technical infringer paying a reasonable royalty provided that use and application does not harm the rights owner.

I see a section with short vertical videos on Youtube that strongly resembles a certain Chinese mobile app. Could it be that those Chinese developers, not respecting intellectual property, are now working for Youtube?

Or maybe not respecting intellectual property when it is profitable is just a worldwide tradition?

Copying an idea is one thing. Outright stealing source code is on different level. i.e. See how Huawei got big - By copying hardware of Cisco routers and loading there Cisco firmware.

You can always check out the Huawei Github, here's some very interesting LTE modem firmware sources :

https://github.com/Huawei-LTE-routers-mods/README

I remember seeing that the main activity or whatever it was of the YouTube app was called something like “YoutubeTiktokApplication”

That wasn’t the exact name, I’ll try to find it, but it definitely had TikTok in the name

I could also be wrong here because I was trying to patch it with ReVanced or something at the time so it could be related to the patcher

I’m not saying that means they’re copying TikTok’s source code but it’s just an odd thing I wanted to share

Someone downvoted me, it does sound odd but I think it was true, here’s someone else seeing the same thing:

https://twitter.com/imShreyasPatil/status/132039916265180364...

However someone said this: “Tiktok is an internal component in Google used by many of the apps, it was written and named like that before the social network existed and is absolutely unrelated.”

You’re right, it reminds me of Silicon Valley’s Vine. Or is that not what you meant?

I remember seeing this name but never heard of anyone using it. So I don't think that Youtube would copy an unpopular app.

YouTube Shorts is a clone of Musical.ly (now rebranded as TikTok) which was a clone of Vine.

What makes you think this is related to “chinese culture” as opposed to “circumstance”? Without qualification it looks like a great demonstration of the fundamental attribution error [0] and a very fashionable position to have in today’s western world.

0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_erro...

The USA is a signatory to the Madrid Treaty Protocol governing international intellectual property rights, but never bothered to ratify it. What might a different country who has bothered to ratify the treaty and been subjected to litigation and trade enbargos at the behest of America maybe think about the behavioral example? There's just one example of a international famous trademark enforcement against American interests which is Societé Des Bains De Mer, the owners of the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco in the 9th District in 2001. Just that solitary case of reciprocal enforcement.

What's missing is the culture of respecting other nations' IP, on both commercial level and individual level. Their laws on enforcing IP are practically unilateral in the context of intl. relations.

Hmmm where might have they learned that strategy? [1][2]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution_in_the...

So the argument is somewhere someone did it before we had international conventions and agreed upon bylaws like WTO, etc., but nevermind, someone some time ago did it, so it's okay?

Indentured servitude is still openly practiced in some countries, so that would make it okay for every country to do it now? Amazing!

Way to equate indentured servitude with copying. There's no arguing with such ridiculous histrionics.

people do not get that copying does not equate to stealing. The copyright trolls have done their work well.

I believe the problem is that it's expected of a developing nation, but once a nation is considered developed it's looked down on. Similar to a person acting childish when an adult. China want's to have their cake and eat it too in almost everything, it's "look how powerful we are, how strong our economy", until it's time to respect patents then it's "no we are still developing, you can't hold that against us".

It’s because China has two faces which are often being viewed simultaneously by foreigners and locals alike. It wants to project peace through power outwardly and put on its best diplomatic display but internally they are training their children to want to kill Americans.

> internally they are training their children to want to kill Americans.

histronics

You can say that again. Yes, obviously these people sending their kids to communist army camps are histrionic but its the type of performance the CCP is looking for. I can send you sources if you aren't aware of what I am talking about.

Well, the argument is that these conventions are exploitative (copyright basically forever) and therefore do not have moral force. Also that certain countries used copying to go up the economic ladder and then kicked the ladder.

so what happens when chinese investors discover patent trolling and start purchasing western IP portfolios to sue american and european companies over in western courts? and what if they start winning?

"wait, no, not like that"

What happens when western government will demand level playing field regarding IP, either by China upholding the IP protection, or by West dropping all the IP protection of Chinese companies?

> West dropping all the IP protection of Chinese companies

what IP? don't they just steal everything?

And that's going to be exact reasoning to get this level playing field going.

so in other words, the state of things being how they are, is the reason they are going to be different?

this is amazingly devoid of any meaning, even for the dumb smart people on HN.

A way to test the hypotheses are, check if Chinese companies generally respect other Chinese companies IP? Seems like that would be the most convenient to copy, so if they DO respect their peers then it IS targeted at foreign people.

Don't forget Rule of Acquisition #17.

I’ve always wondered if the Ferengi were based on the Chinese

Well... some have speculated differently. https://gamerant.com/star-trek-ferengi-anti-semitic-stereoty...

Can you give an example of powerful country that respects other nations?

Is this a stupid trick question where, if I respond with a list of nations not known to engage in industrial espionage and IP theft, you respond by saying "well country X once did something-unrelated-to-this-topic to country Y, so your argument falls flat"?

I'll humor you. Germany and France are not known to engage in systematic industrial espionage and IP theft. Not towards China, not towards European peers, not towards the USA. Please don't move the goalpost by talking about France' colonial epoch and stay away from WW2 and Hitler.

Even French media would disagree with that

https://www.france24.com/en/20110104-france-industrial-espio...

Austinites have joked about the French Ligation being a spy base for 50 years.

That's weird, I've lived in Austin a long time and never heard that. Not saying you're wrong, though I am curious where you heard that? I'm also generally curious about bits of obscure local history.

You're not wrong in the general case, but France does/did a lot of industrial espionage in recent history

Can you give a few examples on this? France is not known for industrial espionage so your claim is the counter to the common narrative

My knowledge of this comes pretty much entirely from non-public sources (namely American graybeard incident responders), but here are a few I dug up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#France_an...

https://www.france24.com/en/20110104-france-industrial-espio...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikileaks-france-leads-russia-c...

https://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/france-intellectual-p...

It didn't really look like dragging but more informing and asking(not being a jerk about it too). As she said, there wasn't resistance, just past inertia.

Additional context in [0], [1].

LGR review of the machine [2].

I would recommend reading [1] because it confirms the GPL violation but paints interesting picture of the reason.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/brand-new-laptop-recre...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/brand-new-laptop-recre...

[2] https://youtu.be/6bODiZ5bP84?t=442 "So I Bought Those Weird New AliExpress Retro PCs…"

Sounds very much like a Chinese PR OP. "Oh yeah we would've loved to attribute as per the license of the code we stole, but those dang online shops won't let us, so we just stole it and never mentioned it"

I don't know how much of the explanation by the Book8088 dev is bullshit, but he exposes a valid point which could be rephrased as: if you attribute copyright to the author, and someone else complains about anything, the platform can take down the product page immediately. We've seen this happening in similar contexts quite often, such as bogus DMCA complaints on YouTube that result in immediate takedowns and enormous efforts from the authors to reinstate the pages. Might be just PR, but the point is sound to me; copyright laws are necessary, but the way they're implemented is total crap.

> if you attribute copyright to the author, and someone else complains about anything, the platform can take down the product page immediately

I'm having trouble following your line of reasoning here...

If you aren't the copyright holder to the work you are presenting you can't counter-assert your rights to publish against the takedown claim.

I don't get how this applies to this situation. Since the copyrighted work isn't being "published" outside of the physical computer.

In this case you have a license to republish the work (the GPL, if you followed it correctly), so you have rights to counter-assert.

I'm sure Amazon, Google, and everyone else like them make it really difficult to communicate such nuance.

As if they're going to check the copyright text on a laptop in the first place.

Again, I said I didn't see how it applied to this situation. I'm just writing in general about copyright and takedown notices.

It's an entirely bogus reasoning and there's no way to claim otherwise. The same device is shipping a myriad other software which can be classified into:

A. Outright copyright violations of proprietary software (i.e. "abandonware")

B. Legally distributed software (e.g. some of the BIOSes of some of the add-on cards), which their permissive licenses generally allow as long as you keep the attribution, which just from the screenshots I can see they did.

C. The main system ROM BIOS, for which some unfathomable reason they _specifically_ decided to remove the attribution (which is technically in violation of both the spirit and the letter of the GPL).

So to claim that they had to violate the copyright of C for "protection" is as bogus as it gets. They have already set themselves up for a cathedral-sized _non-bogus_ DMCA claim, and violating the copyright of the GPL'd BIOS is just the frosting in comparison.

My wild guess: branding. They just disliked not to see their company name first on power on. Plus the general tendency to treat the GPL as a "guideline".

Why would a takedown because of the name on the copyright even work? The license states that you have full permission to use the work. There is no legal basis here. I can legally sell my purchased copy of Microsoft Office and no lawyer is going to stop me because I don't own the copyright to the software on the CDs.

Hell, buy any laptop, you'll soon be greeted by screens that state that some company called Microsoft made all the software. HP and Dell will be ruined!

Regardless of legal basis, I can false copyright strike this developer right now and there is no way for Amazon to get their hands on this device to verify the legitimacy of the claim. Even if they had one at hand, there's no way they're going to go through the trouble to actually check any of this.

> I would recommend reading [1] because it confirms the GPL violation but paints interesting picture of the reason.

I'm not seeing that, but maybe I'm misunderstanding something. [1] includes:

> we are also shared our change without reservation to every enthusiast (buyer).

Which to me says they're freely sharing the source with buyers. And I see in the GPL:

> For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.

Which I understand as "you only have to share source code with buyers" (but they can do what they will with it).

>> BOOK8088: And the foreign trade company words will not even consider these details. A similar thing happens with naming products. For example, we gave it a name, called BOOK8088 . If the name is registered as a trademark, we can only change the name. There are many professional complainers who make money from this. Of course, I knew there was a big problem with violating the GPL at very beginning, and I was preparing for something later. I didn't even expect it to develop so fast.

> Which I understand as "you only have to share source code with buyers" (but they can do what they will with it).

You need a proper attribution. This comment goes at lengths explaining it [0] but removing the copyright and/or authorship (attribution in a general sense) is breaking the license attribution requirements.

[0] https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4577/does-gpl...

From your citation, I think it'd be valid attribution if the BIOS setup UI had a "licensing" tab, that spelled out the IP that this BIOS was derived from. (This is how e.g. iOS and Android do licensing: you drill down into Settings > About > Licensing and all the IP declarations are spelled out there.)

Provided they had that, then the initial "vanity" copyright notice on boot would be extraneous, and they could freely change or remove it.

Without that kind of thing, the on-boot notice is the "load-bearing" UI attribution, and must be retained.

> Without that kind of thing, the on-boot notice is the "load-bearing" UI attribution, and must be retained.

Yep.

It sounds like they are distributing the modified source code, so the only violation is removal of the attribution?

I don't know anything about Amazon, &c, policies, to know if what they say is true, or possibly a misunderstanding?

A Chinese YouTuber has traveled to a company who wouldn’t take the GPL seriously [0]. I wish more people had the nerve to do that instead of letting it slide.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj04MKykmnQ

Shout out to Sexy Cyborg, her HN acc: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=SexyCyborg

Woah, can we put a NSFW on that link? Thx

I came to the conclusion that it is simply their culture. Chinese people, in general, don't have a strong sense of "mine" vs "someone else's". They seem to think that if it's there, then they can just as well take it and do whatever with it.

I had a Chinese friend at University. Smart guy, and friendly, but he just couldn't understand why people in his dorm got mad at him every time he took their stuff from the fridge and ate or drank it. "it was there, I was thirsty! And if you insist, I will replace it..."

I worked with Taiwanese people, haven't had a whiff of that. On the other hand petty theft was a very common occurrence in Soviet daily life, and the mainland owes to its legacy more than to Confucius. So sure, could be the culture but in a surprising way.

Taiwan and modern mainland China have about a century of separation at this point, with very different historical paths. China: civil war -> WW II -> civil war -> communist rule -> several decades of int'l isolation. Taiwan: Japanese colony -> western aligned dictatorship -> liberalized democracy. Recent Taiwanese history has been less tumultuous in many ways, and many aspects of traditional (pre-20th century) Chinese culture are relatively more intact; particularly in areas like religion.

Taiwanese and Chinese people are culturally very different these days. They still have a lot of the same "historical" cultural underpinnings, but day to day life and attitudes among the people are sharply different.

>don't have a strong sense of "mine" vs "someone else's".

They do. But in a different way.

Everything "someone else's" belongs to the people. So they take it.

Everything "mine" belongs to the people too, so they allow others to take it.

The problem is they have a different definition of people. And that definition changes depending on their interest and status.

Imagine replacing people with Chinese and they are fine. But those who are Anti-CCP, not fine.

That's not Chinese culture, that's flat out entitled narcissism.

I heard tell of a guy like that, who'd go and drink someone's drink from the fridge at a Rail company.

The other guy got fed up with what is theft and bullying and added some of the Chromate water to it one day, and the other guy got really, seriously fucked up. Not advocating it, but you can't say he didn't deserve it.

Imagine a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Imagine the devices that pirate GPL code being seized, and when the developers explain they received BSA training that said they did not have to live by the GPL, the assets of BSA member companies are seized on conspiracy charges (after a fair trial.)

Imagine.

Birmingham Small Arms Company?

Business Software Alliance

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Alliance

Business Software Alliance, a Microsoft-backed software licence enforcement outfit.

Have they published a legal opinion on GPL?

Steve Ballmer said that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches,"

Keep in mind that he said this 25-30 years ago when co-running a company whose business was dominating the computing landscape and in direct conflict with the Open Source upstarts. Also, the GPL was maybe 10 years old at that point?

A lot has changed since then. There aren't many people who were correct in their predictions about the computer industry at large, the web, or the internet 30 years ago.

MSFT has not rescinded the statement ever since.

They are one of the biggest corporate contributors to open source software in the world, both in money and in code contributions.

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2018/03/19/micro...

Actions speak louder than words. The Microsoft of 1996 is not the Microsoft of 2023.

The battle is no longer over the desktop, but over cloud and SAAS. Datacenters are back, clients (even "full desktops") are now thin clients again.

2001 was only 22 years ago.

are you saying that in the USA, a Microsoft-funded lawyer group is training people that the GPL does not have legal force edit in some conditions they declare? Do you have evidence of this? links?

BSA, now that's something I haven't heard in a while; '90s mIRC flashback...

> I don't really understand why one would pirate an open source project... Just use it according to the GPL license. Redistribute the modified code, and leave the attribution to the code authors... Is it that difficult?

We have more than enough examples of commercial companies using GPL software without contributing back that I have to assume this question is rhetorical by now.

The Chinese view on IP is very different from the western one, but in some ways it's just as "open source". These articles give a good overview:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807651

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5703946

Then do something about it. The DMCA is actually pretty easy to use.

Not in China it isn't. (Not that China doesn't have any IP enforcement, but it's not the DMCA.)

But they’re being imported to the US.

Which leads to [0] and nothing to the actual entity violating the IP rights.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36371745

The DMCA is toothless in China.

Why would you expect US laws to apply to China?

I believe you can use the DMCA to get importation of a violating product into the US restricted — which is, I think, what the GP is suggesting here.

I expect US laws to apply to goods imported into the US.

Now that China is starting to develop their own IP in some areas (eg EVs) I'm curious how they react if anyone rips off their IP.

I can't imagine they'll react well, but I wonder if it's a genuine "IP isn't a thing" or if it's just "ripping people off is ok it it's for our benefit".

There is no reason to buy these clones on Ali while there is Monotech NuXT.

Well I have to be informed of it's existence, so thanks.

> Monotech NuXT

Hadn't heard of this before, but it's a great concept. I love the idea of modern takes on retro tech.

Wish it were more practical to do something like this for 68k or PPC Macs… unfortunately I don't think there are any usable 68k or PPC derivatives currently in production which limits possibilities. The closest thing I've seen are FPGA-based setups like the Plus Too[0].

[0]: https://www.bigmessowires.com/plus-too/

For easier access, you can run the Plus Too core on the MiSTer FPGA project, which is a bit more prevalent and user friendly (plus supports many, many more systems) (https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/MacPlus_MiSTer).

From the Plus Two site:

> The Mac’s 512 x 342 screen is pixel doubled to fit

Do you know what algorithm they use to “pixel double” the screen?

I don't actually know but I'd imagine it'd have to be nearest neighbor to maintain crisp lines.

Pixel doubling typically refers to the algorithm itself. Simply making each quad (set of 2x2 aligned pixels) in the final image match one of the pixels in the source image.

Is there an inverse function of this? ie. that will take a higher res image and reduce by 4 the number of pixels?

There's the MBC lines(https://shop.mcjohn.it/en/8-diy-kit), options include: Z80, 68K, and the VIC-20. You can get them pre-assembled, but they are far less standard than this XT clone.

Is this the right thing? https://monotech.fwscart.com/details/p6083514_19777986.aspx it doesn't seem comparable. The Ali clones are all in one devices, this is just a motherboard.

> Not just a motherboard, but more of a "single-board-computer", which includes built on, many peripherals that a separate ISA card would usually be needed for.

> Can be used as a full featured IBM XT-compatible without any extra cards.

> Can add Sound, Network Card, or more storage/connectivity via the four ISA slots.

From the linked page. It's an SBC but in a motherboard form factor with expansion slots.

Ah, thanks. Still no keyboard, display, or case. I like the concept, just seems designed for a different use case.

You can get old PC/104 SBCs with tons of integrated IO for much less.

At least one of the clones is a 386, the NuXT is just an 8088.

Nobody wanted an 8088 once the 386 was available, and that was back then.

Convincing "enthusiasts" to buy 8088s in a new box today is little more than shilling e-waste

There's some appeal in constraints-- look at the people who do new homebrew NES/SNES games.

I've built a kit-based 8088 product, and I have a 386 clone. The 386 is more capable, but I've gotten more hobby mileage out of the 8088 because there's interesting projects built around coping with its limitations. (I designed a custom memory board because it was designed with 512k, and I wanted 640 and upper memory blocks, and did some firmware work that made the kit much more usable).

Good on ars to update the article

My god. I would have hoped HN to have less bias and ignorance towards China. To be clear, im totally against the company pirating the BIOS and not attributing the author. But, the comments here regarding China just reads like r/geopolitics or r/wolrdnews.

Taking some classes on east asia doesn’t make you an expert on China. Watching a couple of YouTube videos doesn’t either. Not everything you hear in the west is absolutely true. Same goes for things you hear in China.

You don’t know the culture til you lived there. I didn’t understand American culture until I came to the US and lived for more than a decade here, yet western media is so prevalent in China and I thought I totally knew what the US was like before coming. I was so wrong.

Please go and explore the world with your own eyes. It’s really hard to read comments like these because they appear unbiased and true, but pretty far from reality.

Regarding how Chinese deals with IP, I will attribute it more towards laws and the enforcement of it. You simply don’t get punished for stealing IP until someone powerful sues you. IMO, better IP laws and enforcement will make most of these issues go away. Its not cultural

Yes, and a bunch of other things (look at hard drive content), however everyone should give them a pass since they recreated arguably the most important computer in history for developers and enthusiasts. With an emulator, there is always a question if your software would have worked the same on the original device, or if the game experience is exactly as it was intended to be. Now I have a way to check if my code in fact runs on a real 8088 and CGA.

No, you don't, because among many other things, the BIOS will be different. It's highly likely even the most inaccurate of emulators will actually be more accurate.

You are not going to be using BIOS much for any fun 8088 programming

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