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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 I'm not a moral relativist, like, at all. But in this case, it seems like we westerners have constructed one particular set of norms for encouraging innovation, where we decide that it's possible for ideas to be owned. It's not like there's anything intrinsically wrong with copy-pasting code, it's just that we have a legal framework where we've traded away the right to freely copy-paste code so that we can grant a temporary monopoly to its author. We do this in the hope that more useful code will be written than otherwise. But if the people of China decide that that's not a trade-off they want to make, then I don't think we westerners get to say that they've committed a moral wrong in making that decision. It's just that they have a different way of doing things.
Like I said, I'm not a moral relativist at all. Murder is still wrong in China, imprisoning people not convicted of any crime is still wrong in China, lying is still wrong in China. But I just don't see how copyright infringement is universally an immoral act.
OK, no, it's not intrinsically or uniquely western. Any person who has an idea has no obligation to share their ideas, that's universal. This revolves around the expectation set at the point of sharing their ideas, under which they say, effectively, "Here's something I came up with. I'm sharing it with you in exchange for your agreement that you will attribute it to me and not take the idea and publish it as your own." The ownership and control under closed source could (somehow) be argued in the way you're suggesting, but for open source it's a matter of blatant disrespect and refusal to adhere to and of the requirements set by the initial sharers of their ideas.
Naw... it's just the hypocrisy. If any other company/country were doing it, they should be called out too.
If you actually stop doing the wrong thing and decades later complain about others still doing it (the Western world can complain about slavery) that's moving up and on, but complaining about TikTok maybe being banned when FB/Google/Twitter and TikTok itself are banned in your own country?
Same with copyright... it's not like China's government doesn't issue copyrights and enforce copyrights, it's just that there's not really rule of law since it's enforced so haphazardly. There's little plan other than individuals "what can I get right now".
Getting downvoted by the group-think majority. Just know I tend to agree with you. Our country does not get to dictate how the world operates no matter what our beliefs are. And the idea of intellectual property is just a belief, and a bad one at that.
Operating under a different set of rules doesn't change the fact that they violate ours. They can be simultaneously right under their own standards and wrong under ours. We can and should judge them under our moral standards.
It's one of the ways countries bootstrap. Not right or wrong, just is. Once they've climbed the ladder the US climbed, they'll suddenly start caring about IP too.
You mean all the developed nations’ operation to export almost all production capabilities to China for profit? Cause everyone knew exactly what they were doing when they signed onto those joint ventures that were barely disguised force tech transfers.
We made our bed. No point in accusing China when we made it ourselves.
Invest that jingoist energy into doing something about it!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Nice try, but Tencent cops will be at your door next week. Chinese companies stealing from each other is not counted, as the government makes them play "nice enough."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
> 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.
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".
> 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.
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).
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].
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).
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.
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.
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.
