End of cooperation with Lotharek

[Matej]

Offtopic @x=usr(1536) - I am mechanical engineer. And same petrol cars(basically all since 90s) can use E85 ethanol and diesel (biodiesel) like in Brazil and Earth co2 reduction will be 70% You need only small 30usd box with Atmel or FPGA for upgrade ignition timing in cylinders. Electric cars are future but are overpriced (for 60k You can have very luxury petrol car) and you must wait until EV engines will have supraconductor wires in 25°C (mileage above 1000miles one charge) but this will be like next 20years or more.

Solutions are here but oil/gas megacorps make more money as all car/plane/motorbike/boats industry combined. 

 

all -

I think combination of Opensource(is best for progress)/Closedsource(is good for authors - 100s hours of work)/crowdfunding(also way to keep hw scene in future) will be best for Atari community. 

Edited October 15, 2022 by Matej

[mdivancic]

13 hours ago, Mr Robot said:

I only said this because I know how Candle feels about open Source projects, and I was trolling.

 

I didn't realise I was going to totally derail the thread with four words!

…and a very efficient use of four words it was sir! At this point it is still rolling strong. Oh well, something to read.

[Tuxon86]

Open sourcing often bring constraints on devs. Ever read the GPL or LGPL or any other licensing document? I did, and I wouldn’t release anything under them. It’s my code and I reserve the right to have 100% control over it. I feel no obligation to share, for free, what I worked days, months or years to produce. 
 

Almost none of the games or software we used pre-Linux was open source and it was fine as it was. It didn’t prevent anybody from coming up with their own variant if they were willing to put as much effort as the original author, hence why we have about 100 clones of Pac-Man… 

[Heaven/TQA]

First I had the impression that this was an old thread. I have several devices by Lotharek and candle… never had any complaints. Resolving business issues is being treated better face to face and private imho first. (Just read 1-3 pages so hope I am Late on the party and it is solved already).

 

what I was suprised to read RUTRONIK HQ which is near to me… 😂 small world.

[+x=usr(1536)]

6 hours ago, Matej said:

Offtopic @x=usr(1536) - I am mechanical engineer. And same petrol cars(basically all since 90s) can use E85 ethanol and diesel (biodiesel) like in Brazil and Earth co2 reduction will be 70% You need only small 30usd box with Atmel or FPGA for upgrade ignition timing in cylinders. Electric cars are future but are overpriced (for 60k You can have very luxury petrol car) and you must wait until EV engines will have supraconductor wires in 25°C (mileage above 1000miles one charge) but this will be like next 20years or more.

Matej, I'm not a mechanical engineer, but I have owned somewhere in the region of 90 cars in my lifetime.  You might say that I'm into them

 

I totally agree with everything you've said.  FWIW, E85-capable vehicles have been sold in North America for about 20 years as well, but most are not able to use it and run on petrol regardless since there's virtually no E85 infrastructure to support them.

 

I'll stop with adding to the hijack - if you want to talk more about it, shoot me a PM

[nadir]

3 hours ago, Tuxon86 said:

Open sourcing often bring constraints on devs. Ever read the GPL or LGPL or any other licensing document? I did, and I wouldn’t release anything under them.

Unfortunately due to tool chains, I have some work under GPL, but yeah, it's an absolutely horrible license.  The fact that something so terrible has become the standard makes me question all of humanity.  There are plenty of other better pre-written licenses out there, but the GPL is a virus, once it gets into something it infects everything it touches, making it really hard to use more reasonable licenses.

[ivop]

44 minutes ago, nadir said:

Unfortunately due to tool chains, I have some work under GPL, but yeah, it's an absolutely horrible license.  The fact that something so terrible has become the standard makes me question all of humanity.  There are plenty of other better pre-written licenses out there, but the GPL is a virus, once it gets into something it infects everything it touches, making it really hard to use more reasonable licenses.

Okay, continuing off-topic   The virus part of the GPL has been mitigated by the LGPL. That one won't infect your main program.

 

Nevertheless, GPL3 is something that should never have happened. GPL2, even with tivoization, was fine IMHO. Now projects cannot backport to GPL2 only projects. The version 2 or later has often be replaced by just version 2. And for a reason. Linux is one of them. I stopped using the GPL all together. Just zero-clause BSD for me  

[Mathy]

Hello guys

 

Dieselgate was hyped by people who know just about nothing.  The fact that ECUs are smart enough to sense if the car is on a test circuit, on a dyno or being just being used never was a secret.  They told us at university when we visited a testing location of that same university.  That had a Mercedes at the test location, but spoke in general.  VW was just the unlucky one that got in the crosshairs of the media (and the politicians).  I'm sure most if not all manufacturers use(d) this feature.

 

Dieselgate should never have happened and all those who hyped it should be ashamed of their lack of knowledge and of what they did.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

 

 

 

[E474]

1 hour ago, Mathy said:

Hello guys

 

Dieselgate was hyped by people who know just about nothing.  The fact that ECUs are smart enough to sense if the car is on a test circuit, on a dyno or being just being used never was a secret.  They told us at university when we visited a testing location of that same university.  That had a Mercedes at the test location, but spoke in general.  VW was just the unlucky one that got in the crosshairs of the media (and the politicians).  I'm sure most if not all manufacturers use(d) this feature.

 

Dieselgate should never have happened and all those who hyped it should be ashamed of their lack of knowledge and of what they did.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

 

 

 

 

Except it was used in Mercedes, and they got heavily fined:

 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-daimler-emissions-fine/daimler-to-pay-870-million-euros-fine-in-relation-to-diesel-investigation-idUSKBN1W91KW

 

and other diesel car manufacturers also ended up being fined: 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal

 

[+MrFish]

I'm pretty sure SIDE3 is just powered by the 5 volt line on the cartridge port. IDK, they may be working on solar for it as we speak...

 

Edited October 15, 2022 by MrFish

[HiassofT]

9 hours ago, Tuxon86 said:

Open sourcing often bring constraints on devs. Ever read the GPL or LGPL or any other licensing document? I did, and I wouldn’t release anything under them. It’s my code and I reserve the right to have 100% control over it. I feel no obligation to share, for free, what I worked days, months or years to produce.

That's a large misunderstanding.

 

If you are the copyright holder (i.e. wrote the code) you are free to relicense it under different licenses any time you want - even if you once released your code under GPL you could switch to Apache / MIT / closed source.

 

You can add additional licenses to existing code (dual/triple/... license it) and you can completely switch license for new or separate code (eg new versions being completely non-open-source, Apache, whatever or specific extensions being distributed under close-source only licenses).

 

This applies also to larger projects as long as all of the copyright holders agree (if some disagree you can't do that OFC).

 

so long,

 

Hias

Edited October 15, 2022 by HiassofT

[+x=usr(1536)]

14 hours ago, Mathy said:

Dieselgate should never have happened and all those who hyped it should be ashamed of their lack of knowledge and of what they did.

Dieselgate was also massively political before it even hit the news.  Warning: this will be long.

 

In the interests of full disclosure, we have owned a Dieselgate-era VW Jetta TDi for the past eight years, the first two years of which were in California.  We also have a diesel Jeep Liberty that has been driven in California a handful of times, but was bought after we had left there.

 

Some background: in the US, there are two separate vehicle emissions standards: those determined by the state of California and used by it and approximately 14 other states, and those applied at a federal level to all of the others.  California's standards are higher than those at a federal level, which are very stringent to begin with.  CARB (the California Air Resources Board) is the agency responsible for developing the California standards; the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) sets the federal ones.

 

In 2014, CARB commissioned a study by the International Council on Clean Transportation to work out why emissions were different between European and US/California models of certain vehicles.  Amongst those tested were Volkswagens with the 2.0-litre EA288 TDi engine, which were found to be polluting at higher levels in normal driving than under test conditions.  This spiralled into Dieselgate, and leads us up to where we are today.

 

Now, bear in mind that CARB certifies emissions compliance for every new vehicle model offered for sale in California - or, more accurately, they accept the results of vehicle manufacturers' self-certifications; this is also how the EPA works.  No CARB certification, no sale in the US' single-largest automobile market.  Every manufacturer wants a slice of that market, so they work to meet the CARB standards - except when CARB is openly hostile towards the vehicles the manufacturers intend to sell in California.  But, as testing is left to the manufacturers, all that CARB can really do is spot-check the occasional new model and see what it does.

 

In 1990, CARB passed a mandate that Zero-Emission Vehicles had to constitute a gradually-increasing percentage of new vehicle sales; this would have led to an approximately 25% market share by ZEVs in 2010.  The problem: the technology simply didn't exist to build vehicles that were even remotely practical for 99% of the population.  CARB's answer: keep tightening regulations on gasoline- and diesel-fuelled vehicle emissions in the interim and hope that they could be gradually choked out of the market and replaced by ZEVs that people would buy because they would be about the only new cars that they could.

 

This didn't work as they had expected.  By the mid-1990s, CARB was seeing that the ZEV mandate was utterly doomed to failure, and that they were going to have to repeal it.  The repeal did take place, but their middle finger to every car owner and purchaser in California was to become ridiculously overbearing regarding replacement parts that might somehow affect emissions, and to begin attempts at preventing new light truck and passenger-car diesels from passing emissions requirements.

 

2003: VW has a number of diesel cars certified for sale in California, as do a few other (almost entirely-European) companies.  After 6 months on sale, CARB revoked the certifications for those vehicles, claiming that they now had to meet new standards that had been drafted without warning.  Every single one of those vehicles had to be pulled off of dealers' lots and sent out-of-state if they were to be sold since they could not legally be sold or registered in California.

 

Volkswagen and the other manufacturers took back the vehicles and shuffled them into inventory in other parts of the country while waiting to find out what CARB was going to require them to do.  Roughly six months later, after CARB had moved the goalposts and the manufacturers had been able to once again make their vehicles California-compliant, they were back on the market - for about another six months, at which point CARB pulled the same stunt again.  This time, it was a middle finger to those manufacturers who dared to meet CARB's regulations.

 

Six months after that, some diesels came back onto the market, but not all.  Most manufacturers had given up on trying to sell them in California-compliant states, and either removed them from production entirely or concentrated on other markets where they weren't in a perpetual cat-and-mouse game of bringing in inventory, trying to sell it, having to pull that inventory back out, reconfigure the vehicles, recertify, put the vehicles back on sale, and then risk having to repeat the entire process all over again at CARB's whim.

 

As an aside, Jeep ended up not selling a number of diesel models (Liberty, WK Grand Cherokee, a planned JK Wrangler) in California because they were tired of being jerked around by CARB on certification requirements.  Interestingly, VW and Mercedes managed to hang on in the California emissions states with diesel-engined vehicles throughout all of this (for the most part).  It was a limited model range compared to elsewhere in the country, but they at least had a few on the lots.  CARB was not pleased with this in the least.

 

That would be the case from about 2005 until 2014, when CARB hired the International Council on Clean Transportation to check into new diesel vehicle emissions and Dieselgate sprung up as a result.  Note that this was after about two years of complaining by both the State of California and CARB that the programmes that both had been pushing to move people into hybrids and other fuel-efficient vehicles (like diesels) over the past decade or so had cost the state significantly in terms of fewer fuel taxes being collected at the pump.

 

I'm not going to go so far as to say that Dieselgate was an event specifically engineered to get a slice of any fines that may have ended up being levied against VW (or other auto manufacturers) in order to ease some of the fuel tax losses, but a number of people at CARB in 2014 still bore a grudge against VW for what happened in the 2003 to 2005 timeframe - and, in the end, VW paid approximately $700 million to the State of California in settlement.  This is on top of $800M that VW was forced to 'invest' in ZEV development in the State of California, as well as other financial entanglements with the state government totalling nearly $2B in California alone.  Oh, and take three guesses as to where CARB receives their funding from.

 

Interestingly, however, was that as part of the fallout from Dieselgate, a number of other manufacturers' gasoline-engined vehicles received similar testing to VW's diesels.  A very large chunk of them were also found to have test modes in their ECU software similar to the one used by VW, but those manufacturers never seemed to receive the same level of scrutiny or penalty that VW did.  Never mind that diesel light vehicles in North America make up a statistically-tiny percentage of the vehicles on the roads and thus emit pollutants at a miniscule fraction of the totals of gasoline-engined cars: VW was the one who had to be punished, because CARB had it in for them.

 

To illustrate CARB's attitude towards both cars and the car-owning and -buying public in a bit more depth: I have been the recipient of an export-or-destroy order from CARB over a vehicle I had purchased.  This effectively left me with 90 days to either sell the vehicle outside of California or have it crushed and provide CARB with proof of destruction.  Despite the vehicle having been one that was originally sold in California and was equipped to meet the emissions standards of its time didn't matter: CARB couldn't find it in their computer, so as far as they were concerned the fact that I had old registrations, the original window sticker, bill of sale, and other supporting documentation to prove that it was a California-compliant vehicle was of no consequence.  I'd never be able to register it because there would be no way for it to (legally) pass an emissions test in the state.

 

CARB is a nasty, nasty agency, and while I don't necessarily condone Volkswagen's actions, that they were made to suffer while the rest of the industry was essentially given a slap on the wrist and told to never do it again was just appalling.  Either screw everyone who is equally guilty, or continue to keep the status quo.  But government agencies should not be permitted to carry out vendettas as CARB did to VW.

[Mazzspeed]

33 minutes ago, HiassofT said:

That's a large misunderstanding.

 

If you are the copyright holder (i.e. wrote the code) you are free to relicense it under different licenses any time you want - even if you once released your code under GPL you could switch to Apache / MIT / closed source.

 

You can add additional licenses to existing code (dual/triple/... license it) and you can completely switch license for new or separate code (eg new versions being completely non-open-source, Apache, whatever or specific extensions being distributed under close-source only licenses).

 

This applies also to larger projects as long as all of the copyright holders agree (if some disagree you can't do that OFC).

 

so long,

 

Hias

This 100%. There are pro's and con's to both closed source and open source, both holding no clear advantage with the exception of operating systems where Microsoft believe your PC is actually their PC to do with as they please. It's for this reason that I choose KDE Neon and refuse to use any proprietary desktop OS.

 

Furthermore I'm not inconvenienced in the slightest and can even run a vast majority of Windows based software using a combination of Wine/DXVK/DX9VK - Including Altirra. In fact I run certain Windows software on my Pi400 using a combination of Box86 and Wine (including Altirra) and it runs perfectly.

[+MrFish]

Your mom is open source.

 

[Mazzspeed]

4 minutes ago, MrFish said:

Your mom is open source.

 

Oh that cuts deep! 😂

[+MrFish]

50 minutes ago, HiassofT said:

If you are the copyright holder (i.e. wrote the code) you are free to relicense it under different licenses any time you want - even if you once released your code under GPL you could switch to Apache / MIT / closed source.

 

You can add additional licenses to existing code (dual/triple/... license it) and you can completely switch license for new or separate code (eg new versions being completely non-open-source, Apache, whatever or specific extensions being distributed under close-source only licenses).

 

This applies also to larger projects as long as all of the copyright holders agree (if some disagree you can't do that OFC).

This also applies to anyone's mom who's currently open source.

 

[Tuxon86]

It’s cool if some devs goes open sources and it’s just as cool if some don’t. It’s the nagging that’s bothersome. It’s 2022 and we’re all a bunch of nerds on a retro computing/gaming forum. We know what’s good for our own project.

 

In my case, I won’t go open source. I’m open to people communicating with me to ask for features or improvement in my products, but I don’t want people forking the code and overtake the main project. If you’re interested in pitching in, just ask. Help is always welcome and there’s no need to open the source code to everybody for that. 

[+MrFish]

26 minutes ago, Tuxon86 said:

If you’re interested in pitching in, just ask. Help is always welcome and there’s no need to open the source code to everybody for that. 

Yes, the idea that closed source equals a paranoid miser, full of piss and vinegar, suspicious of anyone having the slightest peak at his code (unless you're in any way affiliated with Video 61)... projects can be cooperative without opening them up to the whole world.

 

Edited October 15, 2022 by MrFish

[Nightengale]

Wait, so the diesel used in the SIDE3 is open source and that is why Lotharek and Candle are not getting along? Or Jon isn't?--I plugged the 9 pages of posts into LaMDA and this was its question.

[+x=usr(1536)]

4 hours ago, Nightengale said:

Wait, so the diesel used in the SIDE3 is open source and that is why Lotharek and Candle are not getting along? Or Jon isn't?--I plugged the 9 pages of posts into LaMDA and this was its question.

[flashjazzcat]

Could certainly do with some of that round our way (where half bricks seem to be the secret ingredient).

 

Don't want to go O/T, but this is from my wife:

 

[E474]

15 hours ago, x=usr(1536) said:

Dieselgate <snip>

 

Or, they could have stayed within the law, and paid nothing in fines.

 

Edited October 16, 2022 by E474
Not clear on whether fines/settlements being approved by judges = set by EPA/CARB/

[thorfdbg]

16 hours ago, HiassofT said:

If you are the copyright holder (i.e. wrote the code) you are free to relicense it under different licenses any time you want - even if you once released your code under GPL you could switch to Apache / MIT / closed source.

Well, yes and no. The critical part is "if you are the copyright holder". The problem is, as soon as others contributed to your code, you are not any more the sole copyright holder, and thus, if you plan to relicence the code, you need to ask all other holders as well. This can be fairly complicated and requires you to keep all contact points that contributed to the code at some point. It is quite ok for small projects, or if you never accept patches, but that somehow defeats the purpose of open source in first place.

 

Quite frankly, the GPL is really quite unpractical in reality. There are creative common licences where you can pick one from a pool of many, or there is the rather simple BSD license where you just give sources away but not (depending on your interpretation) patents.

[Mclaneinc]

Are we still spouting about Open Source...Wow, homes to go to and all that...

 

And @MrFish my 'mom' is truly open source, she was cremated and spread across a church flower bed that has since been dug up..Truly open source..

 

'Mom', I keep thinking my mother's name is Apple pie... Mom.....eeek..

[ivop]

1 minute ago, Mclaneinc said:

Are we still spouting about Open Source...

Yeah, this thread currently is about open source, bricks flying through windows at night and dieselgate