] MSX Association could have seen this coming. If a GPLed emulator was their ] goal, they should not have started with fMSX as their codebase. Stating ] (approximately) two years later that Marat does not allow them to release MSX ] Player under GPL is a bit misleading. Perhaps that they simply assumed that they could simply buy the rights from Marat and then put it under GPL but that their assumption turned out to be wrong. Or indeed, something else might have been going on. That I do not know.
] Is MSX a trade mark? Then why isn't there a "tm" or "(R)" on my 8250 boot All printed documents (user manuals, MSX ROM bios handbook, MSX Technical book, etc) from before '88 or so mentioned 'MSX is a trademark of Microsoft corporation'. Books published as of approximately '88 mentioned 'MSX is a trademark of Microsoft and ASCII corporation'. And later, somewhere around '90, it became 'MSX is a trademark of ASCII corporation'. At least, for the books that I have seen here in Europe. It might be that in Japan, it has been ASCII corporation as of the beginning. After all, some very old documents mentions ASCII/Microsoft far east. There was a very close partnership between ASCII and Microsoft in the early days of MSX. ] screen? Did Philips, Sony etc pay royalties to anyone? Doesn't a trade mark Given the stuff above, I assume yes. I think that for MSX1 and MSX2, they had to pay to Microsoft, for 2+ it was divided between Microsoft and ASCII and for MSX turbo R it was to ASCII only. And on top of that they obviously also had to pay license rights for the MSX Bios, the MSX Disk rom, the JIS/JE stuff and all the other ROMs that are in MSX computers as part of the MSX standard. Or that the manufacturers payed everything to ASCII and that ASCII redistributed the royalties to the respective parties. That is what publisher companies (like ASCII) do. It's one of their main competencies. ] expire if it isn't defended for a prolonged amount of time? Can you even That I do not know. But given the fact that the MS X-box is called MS X-box is instead of MSX-box does say something... ] I know and I am very much concerned about these kinds of laws. So am I. I'm slowly to starting to realize the potential impact of this kind of legislation. It could eventually even kill open-source. Just look at how difficult it is to legally play DVDs under Linux. No vendor wants to make official drivers for Linux. The only way is via 'illegally' reverse-engineered code... Just imagine if in a couple of years from now, you can only download music and video's in windows media format. Then you will not be able to play those under linux. It is even more worrying if microsoft will succeed in killing real-player for streaming audio and video. They are doing a big attempt now by integrating their own streaming audio and video solution into Windows XP and making usage of real-player very hard under XP. If they continue like this, they will succeed killing real-player. Just like they effectively killed netscape... So from this respect, even living outside the USA does not help too much. Though, I will stop this thread now. It is becoming too much off-topic. Kind regards, Alex Wulms -- Visit The MSX Plaza (http://www.inter.nl.net/users/A.P.Wulms) for info on XelaSoft, Merlasoft, Quadrivium, SD-Snatcher on fMSX, the MSX Hardware list, XSA Disk images, documentation, Japanese MSX news from Ikeda and lots more. -- For info, see http://www.stack.nl/~wynke/MSX/listinfo.html
