Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
Christopher Smith wrote:
they invented C++ and Unix. At various points it served their purpose to
close Unix. They were unable to. In the case of C++ it was inevitably
*counter* to their purposes to close it. There are lessons to be learned
there.
Yes. And you seem to have forgotten them. AT&T was called "Ma Bell"
before they got broken up. They spawned an entire Saturday Night Live
skit about "We're the phone company! We don't have to care!"
Let me just follow your logic here:
"bad" company -> produces technology -> will assert IP rights
(questionable or otherwise) for technology
Are you justing waiting for the other shoe to drop vis-a-vis C++ then?
How about the Linux kernel?
Yes, periodically companies, bad or otherwise, will submarine folks with
assertions about IP ownership. Fortunately, we have companies like
Unisys, AT&T, and SCO to demonstrate what happens, and to help lay the
groundwork for making these claims more and more difficult.
Unix wasn't invented and given away. It escaped. And AT&T tried to
stomp the users of it flat in court when they realized it was worth
money. And they only "lost" because Berkeley rewrote a metric
boatload of UNIX of the years *before* the courts got involved. So,
when the case went through, BSD-derived *nixen only had to excise
relatively small portions of AT&T code.
You really did totally miss the lessons here. Why do you think the story
is so different with C++ vs. Unix?
They have no copyright,
trademark or trade secret claims that apply to Mono or DotGNU.
And on whose word does that statement depend? I haven't seen anybody
I trust assert that.
So, I was all ready to just ignore this whole e-mail until I hit this
line. Either you have no clue about IP law (which I seriously doubt), or
you are questioning the word of the folks involved in the Mono & DotGNU
projects. Actually, it's worse than that, because the kind of things you
are accusing them of are some of the worse things you can accuse a
software developer of doing. I'm sorry, but such suggestions are really
insulting to the people who work on those projects. If you're going to
make a statement like that, contact the folks on the projects directly.
Even Darl McBride had the courage to do that.
So, what specific claims do they have to control over C# and the CLR?
If they want to convince people, open source it. If Sun can pull it
off with Java, why can't Microsoft? Once it is truly out of
Microsoft's hands, then we can talk.
Much as I'd love it if they did, it is far from necessary to open source
your implementation of a technology in order to prove you have no claims
on other people's implementations of the same technology, nor would such
an action actually prove that.
Oddly, we knew Java wasn't open source, but we never much worried about
Sun hijacking Java (the worst the Kaffe or gcj guys ever worried about
was a trademark suit for using the word "Java" when they couldn't). Nor
do we lie awake at night worrying about AT&T hijacking C++. We don't
worry about IBM doing something with APL (since someone else brought it
up). We don't even worry about Microsoft doing something like this with
BASIC or VBScript/VB.NET. Why are we worrying so much about C#?
--Chris
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