Hacker News Reader

Comment by girvo | Hacker News Reader

The ROM scene has always been a grey (verging on black) area when it comes to IP, however the enthusiast scene for the original WinMo and Android has helped the market in general.

There has always been a bit of a gentleman's agreement with the manufacturers that if we went too far, we'd be slapped back, but thankfully this has only happened a couple of times.

Indeed, the manufacturers themselves have been known to leak ROMS to the scene on purpose for various reasons. Sony even works directly with the hackers themselves.

View on HN

> The ROM scene has always been a grey (verging on black) area when it comes to IP

Speak for yourself.

There are two scenes: The binary modder scene, where people retro-fit vendor-created and provided firmware-images with their own modifications. Commonly referred to as "Photoshop ROMs". This scene is clearly grey at best.

However, there is another scene: The one based on AOSP source and derivates of it. This scene lives on Github and similar places where open source is shared and reused freely, as intended.

This is driven by serious developers and focus is on doing things cleanly, properly and reliably.

Most successful and widely deployed ROMs (like Cyanogenmod) are based on this scene, and there is nothing grey or remotely shady about it.

Cyanogenmod) are based on this scene, and there is nothing grey or remotely shady about it.

So when Cyanogenmod was distributing the play store apps illegally there was nothing shady going on? It isn't like they suddenly decided to do the right thing, it was a C&D from Google that got them to stop.

http://androidandme.com/2009/09/hacks/cyanogenmod-in-trouble...

Copyright and IP is such a mess that everything is "shady" for any entity if looked from the right (or wrong) angle or country.

I don't think that there has been actual harm and malicious intent in the redistribution of the apps, just the fact that few people can afford the legal counsel fee to understand a licence.

Distributing google apps was not shady from some carefully chosen "angle" or country, it was just plain shady.

That was four years ago. I think that's long enough to make a distinction between "they started out doing something they weren't supposed to" and "there's nothing shady about Cyanogenmod."

And yet people still point out that Volkswagen, Hugo Boss, and IBM worked with the Nazis and that Microsoft had been convicted of an illegal monopoly even though that all happened decades ago.

Yeah no, MSFT was fined €561M as recently as March this year on account of failing to comply with an agreement made in 2009 (to offer users a choice of web browser) following an antitrust case settlement to the tune of €860M in 2007 and a complaint from Opera Software about the missing choice screen.

Don't get me started on the bullshit that is the browser ballot. Their anti-trust case in the US was at least based on something relevant to the PC market, not just a money-grab by a government board trying to prove its relevance.

You do have a point, but I don't think that diminishes my point. 4 years is not a long amount of time to forget the negative actions of an organization.

Oh, I'm sorry. It appears I accidentally fed prose into a markov chain.

Pointing out the past and claiming that things are still that way are different things. Clearly, Volkswagen is no longer building vehicles for the Nazis. It is still an interesting historical fact.

A godwin already? Comparing IP violations to genocide or coercive monopolies just seem like complete hyperbole.

Can you please rephrase in a way that isn't flamebait?

Seriously? You're calling Godwin just because I mentioned the word Nazi? Please do the world a favor and stop using that term unless you understand what it means. No one was compared to Nazis, no reference to genocide was mentioned, and it certainly was not flamebait. The point was that the world doesn't forget the negative associations of an organization just because four years have passed. Hyperbole can be a very effective way to make a point.

Godwin does not mean what you seem to think it means.

Not sure if you're trolling, but hyperbole involving a comparison to Nazi's is surely a godwin. Go on, read up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

"Godwin's law applies especially to inappropriate, inordinate, or hyperbolic comparisons of other situations (or one's opponent) with Nazis – often referred to as "playing the Hitler card"."

Your point is obscured by making a hyperbolic claim that ignores the actual impact of the wrong action.

Yes. Comparison. That's the difference. I didn't say "Cyanogenmod is like Hitler". I said "IBM did work for Hitler 60 years ago, and people still remember that." If anything, I compared Cyanogenmod to IBM.

Using the word Nazi or Hitler does not equal a Godwin. The fact that this needs to be explained so damn often really just shows that we need a new law. Freehunter's Law says that any discussion that mentions the words Nazi or Hitler will invariably get someone to invoke Godwin's Law improperly and make a fool out of himself.

Again: Never made a comparison to Hitler. If you're speaking English as a second language, I'll forgive you.

The open source subset of Android is not practically usable though. There aren't many (any?) devices that work usefully without a lot of proprietary bits.

While true, you don't need to supply the actual copyrighted/licensed binaries across the internet.

You can just supply a shell-script to extract them from the device, and its assumed that interested parties wanting to build the code has the device themselves.

Feel free to call it a loophole, but I don't have a problem with that and definitely don't see it as something shady.

True but from what I understand the images they put out have all the bits baked in. You literally just flash the new firmware onto the device. That means they are distributing bits they don't have licence to distribute.

> The open source subset of Android is not practically usable though.

And that will certainly remain the case if everybody ships their little backyard shed "rom" with proprietary bits included. If there is no demand for replacements, replacements will not be made.

That's why I mentioned the original XDA WinMo crowd, which I was a part of going back to 2006. They fall into the Binary Modder camp. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com