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To: antiRepublicrat
What'll really burn you is that the official name, POSIX, was coined by Stallman.

Hero worship.

With Red Hat's permission.

I'm sure Loral's decision to give the Chinese the engineering expertise to build ICBM's was perfectly fine with you too.

They're getting desperate. But they'd better be careful because, as you said, IBM likes to enforce its patents.

IBM has a cross patent license agreement with Microsoft, Sun too. The end result of this will be more cross license agreements as well, patents are here to stay and if Stallman wants to distribute software he'll have to face the same liabilities as everyone else.

132 posted on 05/14/2007 9:04:48 AM PDT by Golden Eagle
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To: Golden Eagle
Hero worship.

Fact. I don't really care about him, but you despise him, so it's fun to show you things like that.

Plus you just sidestepped the issue. Linux is more legit in acting like UNIX than Vista is in acting like OS X, or NT being designed by former DEC employees using their VAX experience.

I'm sure Loral's decision to give the Chinese the engineering expertise to build ICBM's was perfectly fine with you too.

That falls under export controls. This doesn't. Is that too hard to grasp?

You again sidestep the issue, in that Red Hat's work was not stolen, and the license you don't like, and that allowed the Chinese to take it, is the only reason Red Hat, and thus the jobs of its American employees, exists. I guess you'd prefer those American programmers be out of a job.

IBM has a cross patent license agreement with Microsoft, Sun too.

Really? I've never heard of it. They probably did back in the early days of OS/2 joint development, but that was a long time ago, and IBM has filed thousands of patents each year in the about 15 years since then.

patents are here to stay

That's fine, but it's software patents I'm worried about. You think about it only in connection to free software (which includes BSD and thus OS X, and even portions of Windows), but it also affects small proprietary software companies. They don't have the defensive patent portfolios of the big guys, so the end of this trend will be that the only people developing software are the large corporations.

137 posted on 05/14/2007 10:18:55 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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