In this guest editorial, Jerry Epplin takes a look at the recently unveiled RTLinux patent, including a summary of what the patent says, the implications of the patent to the GPL status of RTLinux, and some of the issues and concerns that may arise when developing applications that incorporate RTLinux. Epplin writes . . .

If you follow the open-source software culture at all, you're aware of the us vs. them mentality that has developed. In the Slashdot view of the world, there are those who “get it” and those who don't.

If you get it, you build upon the body of open-source code that exists, and you hand all of your new code, including any inventions that it implements, back to the community. If you don't get it, you patent your inventions, implement them in software distributed under restrictive licenses, and sell the combination in a way that maximizes your profits. Few gray areas are seen in this bipolar view of people as either cooperative or competitive.

It should be no surprise that complications to this caricatured world view have arisen in recent years. We have Sun, traditionally viewed as nothing more than a Microsoft wannabe, releasing StarOffice under the GPL. We have Tim O'Reilly denouncing the Amazon.com patents to the cheers of the open-source crowd while continuing to sell most of his books under restrictive licenses.

But few cases show as close an intertwining of open and proprietary licensing as that of RTLinux, the real-time Linux add-on provided by Finite State Machines Labs (FSMLabs).

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