Kano vs Bitsyncom

[-ck]

Ok.

Hey Bitsyncom, could you please post the source to your modifications to the GPL licensed cgminer code?

Thanks,
Con.

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[organofcorti]

The one thing I don't understand in all this flameage is why Jeff Garzik isn't championing the request for source from Avalon. Jeff?

After certain people made that task considerably more difficult?  It is difficult to summon the motivation.  Ask again in 30 days...

The asking is pretty simple - you could just cut and paste Con's example:

Ok.

Hey Bitsyncom, could you please post the source to your modifications to the GPL licensed cgminer code?

Thanks,
Con.

[BitSyncom]

Ok.

Hey Bitsyncom, could you please post the source to your modifications to the GPL licensed cgminer code?

Thanks,
Con.

will do once organized, We have no intention to not disclose the source code.

[nathanrees19]

will do once organized, We have no intention to not disclose the source code.

Only to violate the license just a little bit?

[kano]

The one thing I don't understand in all this flameage is why Jeff Garzik isn't championing the request for source from Avalon. Jeff?

After certain people made that task considerably more difficult?

Awwww ... it's more difficult to ask now? ... for the source that was available at least 24 days ago?
I guess that means all this sucking up to Avalon has caused continuous deterioration of your brain over the last 24 days and it's getting more difficult to join all those big words of more than 3 letters together.

It is difficult to summon the motivation.

Difficulty finding the  motivation to stand up for OpenSource?
Hmm ... I guess that makes it pretty clear where you stand against OpenSource.

A Bitcoin dev who can be easily bought with a 25BTC 'donation' ... and ditch OpenSource as easily as that ...
Doesn't say much for Bitcoin devs ...

Ask again in 30 days...

Not sure if anyone else was expecting that, but I certainly am not surprised at all.
You certainly have no respect from me regarding you blatant lack of support for OpenSource - though I'm certain that doesn't concern you.
But again, I'm not surprised, you were paid off to do it and did it for cheap.

[nathanrees19]

The one thing I don't understand in all this flameage is why Jeff Garzik isn't championing the request for source from Avalon. Jeff?

After certain people made that task considerably more difficult?  It is difficult to summon the motivation.  Ask again in 30 days...

Actually, can you post the cgminer binary? 1 satoshi says I can reverse engineer most of their changes before they release the source.

[Mobius]

Ok.

Hey Bitsyncom, could you please post the source to your modifications to the GPL licensed cgminer code?

Thanks,
Con.

will do once organized, We have no intention to not disclose the source code.

I make it simple. You release product, you release source. There is no need to organize it further. You obviously have it organized enough to release the product.

[mobodick]

Well, the feedback from the gentle readers

2112's post sounded awfully cryptic

and not-so-gentle readers

Quoted, because it seems like you actually believe that detailed information about TSMC's processes exists in the modded cgminer.

is that my "Teach yourself IC design,fabrication&test in 21 minutes" lecture is too hard and sounds like black magic.

I'm going to quote single linear thought from my post to maybe make it easier to follow.

I'm not sure how much TSMC values the non-disclosure about the manufacturing node that Avalon used. But before they had their chips manufactured by TSMC they had to sign something about obeying reasonable care to avoid disclosing TSMC-proprietary and whoever-else-proprietary information. SHA-2 is an example of a self-testing structure, something akin to the test structures used in the manufacturing process testing and calibration.

When Avalon is going to disclose their voltage regulator and clock synthesizer programming information it will allow competent people to obtain very detailed information about TSMC process used. I don't think that theres much commercial value in that, but it is the intentions that count. Avalon signed not to disclose, but allowed disclosure through carelessness. TSMC aren't going to be thrilled about it and will drive harder bargain when Avalon tries to order the 2nd batch. I'm not expecting somebody from Chronicle Technology open the account to post "Thanks, suckers.", but maybe some of the Avalon competitors will do that.

The technique I'm talking above is called "yield estimation using test data". SHA-2 is 100% self-testing and trivial to reverse-engineer. Competent semiconductor manufacture engineer can with the help of changing clock frequency and supply voltage obtain a highly proprietary data in a completely non-destructive way (no chip desoldering, decaping, etc.)

An observant reader may ask "why neither Intel nor AMD seem to care about chip with unlocked clock-multiplier and voltage identifier". The answer is "binning". A large manufacturer will do an extensive test of their chips and sort them into bins. When they sell the "enthusiast-grade" chips with unlocked clock they sell them from the "fastest process corner" bin. All other bins are clock-locked and sold cheaper into OEM market. By "bin sorting" the manufacturer can completely obfuscate actual process parameters and make competitive yield estimation pointless.

On the other hand Bitcoin ASIC vendors cannot afford detailed chip testing, both because of financial and time constraints. Any chip that passes quick needle-test on the wafer prober will be packaged and mounted in the shipping product. This situation gives the analyst the sampling of an entire defect/yield curve for the fabrication process.

As far as I know the most commercially/competetively interesting information is obtained by testing the worst chips, those from the bin nearest to the "trash bin", the ones that barely met the specifications. In fact the content of the "trash bin" is quite valuable to the competition and therefore each fab carefully destroys the chips that failed the acceptance tests.

I hope that the above addition my posts will look more like grey magic than black magic. Please do some web searches about "yield estimation chip" and read the freely-available information.

The process that seems to be used is quite old. There is not a lot anyone can learn on this scale. Competitive electronics design is happening on the extremes where new structural designs are actually needed for progress.
At the level avalon delivered they were working with well developed tech using macro blocks.
I'd guess not very interesting to the competition.

Moreover, avalon could have easily developed cgminer in a way that would separate the TSMC sensitive data.
While you claim that there must be sensitive data in their version of cgminer i see no proof of that. In fact, because they don't release the code (even in redacted form) there is no way to actually check. So your claims are completely baseless.

But in any case, if there actually IS sensitive data baked into this version of cgminer then avalon have put themselfs at odds with either the fab license or the GPL. One requires them to disclose what the other forbids to disclose.
This is a situation that is entirely avalons fault and should not have existed in the first place.
That alone should be enough for the community to shunt avalon as they turned out to be greedy bastards.

[mobodick]

The one thing I don't understand in all this flameage is why Jeff Garzik isn't championing the request for source from Avalon. Jeff?

After certain people made that task considerably more difficult?  It is difficult to summon the motivation.  Ask again in 30 days...

It seems to me to be much more likely that you enjoy your asics so much that you just desided to stfu...

[Raoul Duke]

The one thing I don't understand in all this flameage is why Jeff Garzik isn't championing the request for source from Avalon. Jeff?

After certain people made that task considerably more difficult?  It is difficult to summon the motivation.  Ask again in 30 days...

Can I start distributing a Red Hat fork with my hardware, as an essential part of it, without releasing the source and you'll talk to your bosses about them waiting 30 days so I can remove "some debugging code"?
No lawsuits, deal?
Oh, BTW, if your boss asks for the source code right away he will make license compliance a considerably more difficult task. Ask again in 30 days, maybe?

[Syke]

Ok.

Hey Bitsyncom, could you please post the source to your modifications to the GPL licensed cgminer code?

Thanks,
Con.

will do once organized, We have no intention to not disclose the source code.

That's not for you to chose. You are in violation of the GPL. You shipped binaries, now deliver the source code. There is nothing to organize.

[Dalkore]

Note: After reading through these threads it is clear this discussion/request has turned in to Political Statement about Open Source and trying to prove something.   He said is will be released in 30 days so there you have it.  

Linksys used open source software in their routers for quite some time before they finally released the source to be compliant with GPL.  

Bottomline is that they are working in small team with a tight deadline against stiff competition and they have made it clear that consist bashing, name calling and nagging is not going to affect their decision or speed up the 30 days window.  

Leave it be, come back in 30 days if nothing has happened and go lick your wounded egos.  

Disclosure:  Being a paying customer I care about ship time over GPL at this point, once it fully ships, that is another story.  My company provides Asterisk PBX systems running on Linux so I understand the arguement, don't get me wrong.

[jgarzik]

Note: After reading through these threads it is clear this discussion/request has turned in to Political Statement about Open Source and trying to prove something.

Or free hardware requests disguised as political statements

If any of these teenagers like kano had a clue about pursuing GPL violations, they would understand that going straight to curse words and screaming accusations is logically less likely to produce the source code in a meaningful amount of time.  It is also less likely to produce long term cooperation, as it creates a hostile environment at the start of the relationship.

There is lots of good text and FAQs from folks with a track record of pursuing GPL violations at http://gpl-violations.org/ including http://gpl-violations.org/faq/violation-faq.html which suggests

How can I help gpl-violations.org ?

Firstly by not reacting to a technical GPL violation in an extreme fashion. Secondly by checking the violation is indeed a violation.

Join the mailing lists, discuss issues there first. Be polite but firm when dealing with companies and remember that the goal is to ensure a company stops violating the GPL and does not violate it again, rather than to leave a smoking crater at the location of their HQ... at least not on the first offense.

Keep records of conversations with companies. Co-ordinate with others. A company faced with eight different stories will find it hard to deal with. A company faced with a single accurate information source can respond better.

Beware the "public shaming" bomb. It's easy to let off, but very hard to defuse if you made a mistake or the issue turned out to be minor and is rapidly resolved. In addition companies may become very defensive in such cases and decide to "tough it out". We want to build bridges and giving a company no way to avoid losing face hinders that, especially in certain cultures.

If we want to encourage Avalon to be a contributing open source community member, throwing curses and legal deadlines at the outset is the last thing you want to do.  Act like a mature adult, and understand that everybody has different priorities and perspectives.

Understand that these details may take weeks or months to sort out, especially if it is the first release of a new product line.

Coordinate with other interested parties in the bitcoin community, come up with some positive reasons why Avalon should open source their work, open a dialogue with Avalon, work with the company to show them that open source makes engineering and economic sense.

You don't want the only incentive to use open source being fear.  That just encourages a company to do anything they can to minimize or avoid open source as much as possible.

We want ASIC vendors to be open source friendly because it is good for everyone involved.

[mobodick]

Note: After reading through these threads it is clear this discussion/request has turned in to Political Statement about Open Source and trying to prove something.   He said is will be released in 30 days so there you have it.  

Linksys used open source software in their routers for quite some time before they finally released the source to be compliant with GPL.  

Bottomline is that they are working in small team with a tight deadline against stiff competition and they have made it clear that consist bashing, name calling and nagging is not going to affect their decision or speed up the 30 days window.  

Leave it be, come back in 30 days if nothing has happened and go lick your wounded egos.  

Disclosure:  Being a paying customer I care about ship time over GPL at this point, once it fully ships, that is another story.  My company provides Asterisk PBX systems running on Linux so I understand the arguement, don't get me wrong.

Prove this and you might have a point.
Any deadlines are voluntary and the competition is butterfly "the chips will be on their way soon" labs.

[Nemesis]

Note: After reading through these threads it is clear this discussion/request has turned in to Political Statement about Open Source and trying to prove something.

Or free hardware requests disguised as political statements

If any of these teenagers like kano had a clue about pursuing GPL violations, they would understand that going straight to curse words and screaming accusations is logically less likely to produce the source code in a meaningful amount of time.  It is also less likely to produce long term cooperation, as it creates a hostile environment at the start of the relationship.

Say the kid himself, only disguised in a man body. I feel terrible for your kids if any. Dont make the doctor slap your wife after he delivers your child.

[mobodick]

If we want to encourage Avalon to be a contributing open source community member, ...

Didn't they kindof already decided to contribute to the community by using a hacked up cgminer in a product they sell?
 

[mobodick]

We want ASIC vendors to be open source friendly because it is good for everyone involved.

So you suggest everyone sucks up to them as much as you do?
Is avalon just as friendly to the open source community?
Did they not already profit from the open source community by releasing a product that includes open source work?
And did they not agree to release the source code with the product in such a case?

The community should not have to play nice to have source code released.
Play their fanboy all you want, fact is they abuse their open cource license for competitive reasons.

Anyway, you should stay the hell out of this discussion because since you're just about the only one with a working box no one will take your word for being non-biased...

[Syke]

The community should not have to play nice to have source code released.

Playing nice has worked so well in the past:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83794.0

[Dalkore]

Note: After reading through these threads it is clear this discussion/request has turned in to Political Statement about Open Source and trying to prove something.   He said is will be released in 30 days so there you have it.  

Linksys used open source software in their routers for quite some time before they finally released the source to be compliant with GPL.  

Bottomline is that they are working in small team with a tight deadline against stiff competition and they have made it clear that consist bashing, name calling and nagging is not going to affect their decision or speed up the 30 days window.  

Leave it be, come back in 30 days if nothing has happened and go lick your wounded egos.  

Disclosure:  Being a paying customer I care about ship time over GPL at this point, once it fully ships, that is another story.  My company provides Asterisk PBX systems running on Linux so I understand the arguement, don't get me wrong.

Prove this and you might have a point.
Any deadlines are voluntary and the competition is butterfly "the chips will be on their way soon" labs.

It is quite clear to anyone who can read the many posts and evaluate the information.


Also it is not about playing nice or not, the point is no matter how much you bitch or make hard statements, will not make them move any faster and only alienates you from getting to your goals.  Use tact and strategy and you will 9 times out of 10 get what you want faster and burn less bridges.

[Dalkore]

The community should not have to play nice to have source code released.

Playing nice has worked so well in the past:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83794.0

How are we tying an article about Bitcoin scams and getting source code released together?  I am at a loss?