Christopher Smith wrote:
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?
No. But only because other large companies kept an eye on AT&T through
the critical phase. In addition, both ANSI and ISO grants have been
examined by many other large company lawyers and found to be acceptable.
How about the Linux kernel?
Were there not concerns that RedHat might have patents that get in the
way for a while? Just because you *want* something to be true does not
make it true.
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.
Um, yes. Yes, I am questioning their word.
Mono and DotGNU come from Novell. Novell has already cut one *very*
questionable deal with Microsoft that sure looked like an attempt to
undercut Linux.
Until someone like, say, IBM places a bunch of lawyers on it and
declares Mono/DotGNU clean, I'm not buying it.
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.
Uh, and exactly what will that do to allay my suspicions?
Nothing.
In addition, I can believe that the developers are fine upstanding
individuals and really mean what they say. And then Microsoft or Novell
can pull out the sharks and completely undercut it all *anyhow*.
Take a look at their C# .Net licenses. Microsoft reserves the right to
change those licenses any time they choose to pretty much any terms they
choose.
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.
That is true. However, nobody with enough weight to counterbalance
Microsoft seems to be willing to stick their neck out on this.
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).
Actually, that's not true. Quite a few people worried about exactly
that. I wasn't one of them because folks existed with alternative
implementations and with lawyers who had examined the landscape.
We don't even worry about Microsoft doing something like this with
BASIC or VBScript/VB.NET.
We might if there were significant products trying to use them on other
OS's. In addition, IIRC, there were a couple of VB-alike things for
Linux that died off simply because Microsoft kept mutating things so
fast. Whether that was due to progress or malice is an open question.
-a
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