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.
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.
A lot of closed source operating systems or as they are called back then an operating system (open was the exception) were successful and failures. Just like today both closed and open OS fail
> 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.
Sounds to me a lot like a Beowulf cluster, is it not?
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.
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.
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.
I meant to say "never heard that term" but it is too late to edit.
If I heard "lego elements" I would guess that it was a new line, like Lego Mindstorms or whatever. I'd think "lego pieces" would be the more realistic thing to expect people to say.
But I'm still gonna call them "legos". And yes me and my daughter have more legos than just about anyone. :)
Thank you for citing this. LEGO is notorious for protecting their trademark. It was a really silly name to use and they will definitely get a C&D quickly.
Ugh, no, it's not. This is a commonly repeated myth. The circumstances in which you could even possibly lose control of a trademark in this way (genericization, abandonment) are very narrow. A quick search brings up a more detailed explanation than I have time to type up tonight: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...
If you look at the actual trademarks you will see that there is no registration for Operating Systems. Trademarks are only for specific goods and services, you can't globally prevent use of a word.
Really makes one wonder how a project like this can go on this long without this obvious problem coming up.
How many hours were spent writing an OS (not a trivial task), plus making this nice looking website and graphics, plus all the research papers cited etc? They even went to a conference!
Way back in 2004, I used brickOS via Cygwin to build a LEGO robot capable of playing Connect4... the event was a competition by rtlToronto, jokingly called Deep Yellow. Amazingly, there are some pics still online here: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=71985
When I first read LegoOS, I thought it was an OS made by Lego. I wouldn't be unreasonable considering that they have a software platform with the Mindstorm line.
The fact that confusion is possible goes against the spirit of the trademark law.
”In the LEGO Group, we believe that any original product design should be protected against copying for as long as it is produced and marketed”
They may believe that, but I’m not aware of any patent law that works that way. I think the design should, after x years, lose design protection (the trademark should exist for at least as long as it sees active use, so copies shouldn’t be allowed to call their product LEGO® or something similar)
"If the LEGO trademark is used at all, it should always be used as an adjective, not as a noun."
Finally, a website I can point to people who argue about whether it's "Lego" or "Legos" and I remind them that it's technically neither since it's an adjective, not a noun.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
In what way is this "bulldog" behaviour? Not letting people use your distinctive brand name and trademarks in their commercial website is mild brand protection at best. Super obvious.
I use that word all the time to describe going after someone/something aggressively. I'm not against it, and would "bulldog" anyone that ripped off my brand, open source or otherwise!
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?
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
LEGO trademark registration 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.
Its funny when you think about whats fair in this kind of stuff.
For example if you use AppleSomething, apple is a fruit, was a famous record label before being a famous computing brand.
As theres a fruit before anything else, you can argue why you could have some rights over the brand. If is AppleOS of course you can have trouble because Apple the IT company have a OS and they might argue this is a common way people refer to iOS or MacOS.
But Lego is a whole different category. There is no well known concept of Lego before Lego was created, and theres a sort of mechanics and way of thinking that is totally associated with the idea of Lego because of the Lego toy.
So if you use Lego in that sense even if its for something else, they might reclaim the concepts name, because they actually invented not just a toy, but a toy with a concept of composability for which people might be inclined to reuse the name, not because of the toy, but the larger concept the toy represents.
> The LEGO trademark is considered
> a famous trademark in a number of
> jurisdictions. In some indicated in a
> registration certificate or included on a
> list of famous trademarks, but most often
> confirmed through decisions rendered
> in specific cases. It means that the
> LEGO trademark has the widest possible
> protection, i.e. for all goods and services,
> and that we should be able to prevent
> others from using the LEGO trademark,
> not just for toys, but for any goods.
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.
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.