
LegoOS: A Disseminated, Distributed Operating System - kick
http://legoos.io/index.html
======
empath75
So, actually reading the paper. What it appears that they are doing is blowing
up the concept of a 'server' entirely, and replacing the system bus with
network. So you can have a bunch of 'servers' racked together which create a
pool of cpus, ram, storage, and so on, all of which are connected by the
network. And then they pull from this pool of resources to create vNodes which
are like virtual machines.

I like the idea. It'll be interesting to see it develop. It could be the core
of the next ec2, or I guess it could be nothing.

~~~
rmah
Sounds sort of like what AT&T did with Plan 9 back in the day.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
Why didn't Plan9 catch on/pan out mainstream?

~~~
kick
Plan 9 was intentionally not a product. They later tried to productize it with
Inferno, but that failed primarily because it came a decade too late.

~~~
MisterTea
The Plan 9 source license was $1,000,000 USD (1.6M today). Not exactly pocket
change. There was also the problem that Bell Labs didn't have a marketing
team. Lucent tried to market Inferno and it did make it into a few Lucent
products.

If anyone is interested in Plan 9 then head over to 9front.org and grab an
iso. That or there is an accompanying fork of inferno named Purgatorio of
which there is now a docker image.

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heavyset_go
LEGO have a very friendly[1] explanation that they must pursue legal action to
protect their trademark internationally.

They have rules about using their trademark in names, logos, websites and
URLs.

[1] [https://www.lego.com/en-sg/legal/notices-and-
policies/fair-p...](https://www.lego.com/en-sg/legal/notices-and-
policies/fair-play)

~~~
robbrown451
You broke their rules by not adding a trademark symbol after the word LEGO.
You'll be receiving a C&D letter from their legal team shortly. :)

Some of their rules are ridiculous, for instance I have to use all upper case
and am not allowed to use the word as a noun, for instance to call them
"Legos" (I must say LEGO™ bricks, even though many of the pieces are not at
all brick shaped).

Sorry but no.

That said, I'm surprised anyone would think it was a good idea to name their
OS "LegoOS" and include pictures of LEGO™ bricks.

~~~
frosted-flakes
They don't want their trademark turning into a noun (or a verb), just like
Velcro doesn't want their trademark to be used to refer to "hook and loop"
[1]. It's not unreasonable for them to try to protect their trademark.

1 - [https://youtu.be/rRi8LptvFZY](https://youtu.be/rRi8LptvFZY)

~~~
robbrown451
Yeah and it's not unreasonable for people to push back and say "I'm going to
call them Legos if I want to." Obviously they aren't going to go and sue a
mommy blogger because she refers to Legos wrong (much less me saying it on
Hacker News), but still.

At least Velcro has a sense of humor about it. They recognize that no one in
the real world is going to follow their rules, but they still have to say that
they want you to, so the word doesn't get legally genericized.

They probably actually WANT you to use it generically, it helps their brand,
since they are only ones allowed to sell it by the word everyone refers to it
by. But they can't say that out loud, or it has negative legal repercussions.

~~~
frosted-flakes
I actually agree with you. Both sides are reasonable. I also didn't think of
your last paragraph.

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empath75
I'm amazed they got as far as building a website without considering that they
can't use a trademarked name like that.

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vimota
The Morning Paper (by Adrian Colyer) does a great summary of the paper:
[https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/10/22/legoos-a-disseminated-
di...](https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/10/22/legoos-a-disseminated-distributed-
os-for-hardware-resource-disaggregation/)

------
Lastweek
Hi one of the paper authors here. Most of the discussions here center around
the legal concern rather than the project itself. We are working on that. But
for now we decide to take down the website first. Sorry for the inconvenience
folks and thank you all for the input.

~~~
mbreese
Given that they took down their site... in case anyone is interested in the
actual project (and not the trademark issues with the name) -- here are some
links:

[https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi18/presentation/shan](https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi18/presentation/shan)

[https://github.com/Wuklab/LegoOS](https://github.com/Wuklab/LegoOS)

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ASalazarMX
Imagine if they get a C&D from Lego, and they rename it to BrickOS[1].

1\. [http://brickos.sourceforge.net/](http://brickos.sourceforge.net/)

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folkhack
Incoming DCMA takedown notice in 3... 2....

(seriously though, Lego is famous for being bulldogs in regards to their
trademark/brand!)

~~~
mortenjorck
As DMCA stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act, trademarks are outside
its scope. There have actually been successful counterclaims under section
512(f) against companies using the DMCA to police trademark infringement.

All that said, an old-fashioned _cease and desist_ letter from Lego is most
certainly incoming.

~~~
amyjess
Honestly, I would rather get an email from my hosting company saying my
project has been taken down after receiving a DMCA notice than get a visit
from a process server saying that a huge corporation has filed a suit against
me.

Not having a DMCA for trademark means that the process server is very, very
likely to knock on your door for naming something after Lego.

~~~
mortenjorck
Fortunately, it’s highly unlikely you’d be the target of a suit right off the
bat. A cease-and-desist is just a warning that, should you continue what the
sender considers to be infringing, they intend to file a suit.

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pjmlp
So nothing related to the actual legOS for Lego Mindstorms.

[https://sourceforge.net/projects/legos/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/legos/)

~~~
wjsetzer
That would be my first idea for a new name. With that project being last
updated in 2004, I'm sure they would be fine.

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mondoshawan
I don't see how this is any different compared to Beowulf, Mosix, Amoeba and
other mass-machine boundary-eliminating systems that were attempted back in
the 90s. Am I missing something that makes this better suited to the task of
resource utilization across nodes?

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Alupis
I initially thought this had something to do with the "leJOS" JVM for Lego
Mindstorms[1][2].

What's the use case for a distributed operating system? HPC? Or is it just for
resilience?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeJOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeJOS)

[2] [http://www.lejos.org/](http://www.lejos.org/)

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crankylinuxuser
Alternate names: BlocksOS, DistrOS, DistribOS,BuildOS

I'd suggest cloning the repo locally, as when this gets TOS'd for obvious
trademark issue, Github's deletion won't hit your local machine (but will also
nuke forks on GH).

Cool project, poor choice in name.

~~~
jolmg
BrickOS

At least, that's what SE calls them for their site bricks.stackexchange.com.

~~~
ansible
As others have mentioned, BrickOS already exists as alternate LEGO Mindstorms
software.

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Already__Taken
I can't remember the name of the company but this sounds like a level down
from what a "hosting" provider was working on with Eve Online to demo
dynamically provisioning compute for the universe in blocks whose size adapts
to the population.

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als0
Previous discussion from a year ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488292)

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AlexDragusin
The page seems to be down already.

[https://youtu.be/NeKXvINnk04?t=129](https://youtu.be/NeKXvINnk04?t=129)

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treve
Wouldn't this be a copyright infringement?

~~~
EgoIncarnate
Trademark infringement. They could argue it is a different category than the
toy company, but I think that line of argument is already lost given they are
using LEGO style bricks on the website.

~~~
Supermancho
> They could argue it is a different category than the toy company, but I
> think that line of argument is already lost given they are using LEGO style
> bricks on the website

It helps that it _is_ a different product. They could put down Pikachu
iconography and that doesn't make the product similar to Pikachu. All colored
bricks are not (yet) under Mattel's control. I think there's wiggle room.

~~~
PeterisP
LEGO trademark registration
[https://trademarks.justia.com/745/93/lego-74593028.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/745/93/lego-74593028.html)
registers the trademarks also in all the major categories where software can
fall in, and so it's upon LegoOS to demonstrate that there's no way that an
uninformed consumer might confuse and think that they're related (which is
IMHO impossible, given a single look at their homepage).

It also explictly lists that the trademark is used (among other things) for
educational computer programs, computer accessories, entertainment services in
the nature of providing facilities for playing computer games, conducting
workshops for instruction in the use of computer software, etc - and that's
true, I personally know a bunch of software products with the LEGO™ brand.

As the trademark is both used and registered not only for plastic bricks but
also in the field of software, naming a product LegoOS by itself would invite
a trademark claim, and putting a red brick (that's not registered, but
definitely does create an association for the average consumer, which matters
very much in trademark claims) on the homepage just removes any maneuvering
space; IMHO it'd be a slam-dunk guaranteed immediate injunction if LEGO sends
a C&D that gets contested. And the practice of trademark law means that they
pretty much _must_ sent a C&D, not doing so would be quite bad for them.

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theincredulousk
Supports Infiniband out of the box - neat!

~~~
rkagerer
Yeah! Sounds like it fits in well with their approach:

 _The initial implementation focuses on process, memory, and storage monitors
communicating via a customised RDMA-based network stack._

Also offers low latency which would be key for a distributed system like this.
I've made use of a lot of older-gen Infiniband gear off eBay (was cheaper than
10GigE, more performant) and love it.

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topkai22
Maybe Mega Blocks will give them a license to use their mark :)

