When all this dies down maybe someone will reflect long and hard about software liscences and letting one company essentially ""control"" something as heterogenous as UNIX.

And the madness that surrounds Software Patents.............

I've patented the colour RED to use on my website -

Sorry you can't use RED anymore - and make that ORANGE too - its a derivative of RED...........LOL


Is any of this really healthy?

Do you really have to ask?

And that's no btw

If Bill Gates were forced to release the original code for MSDos I think there would be alot more similarities between DOS and shell than just cd and mkdir. Basically Gates stole MSDos from UNIX and changed rm to del cat to type and poured in a ton of BUGS!

No, if that had happened, DOS would have had useful things like pipelines, memory management, multi-user support, multi-tasking (preemptive, maybe), network support, etc. Even now, most of the useful things that were around in the '80s in UNIX doesn't exist in MS "operating system" products. MS is good at embrace and extend, but they don't know jack about what makes a useful OS, so couldn't steal one even if it bit them.

My favorite quote about Microsoft:

I'm going to IP strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational forces. Your atom and all it's component's are just going to fall right apart .

you can't patent an idea, but you can patent a process.
i'm going to patent the process of creating a thought, and
that will cover thinking. the more you try to fight it, and
the more you try to figure it out, the more you will owe me.
i use the word idea loosely in the following though.

the standard for a patent is supposed to be that a person
with the normal skills and knowledge in the certain area
of expertise couldn't just come up with that idea by a little
effort. by that i mean, if you put a specific problem
before a person of typical skill in that area, he or she
wouldn't come up with that idea. it has to be novel and
unique. generally it should be the result of a lot of
research and experimentation. if just looking at the idea,
the person skilled in that area's first thought is, anybody
could come up with that, then it shouldn't be patentable.

we were also taught in intellectual property class that
if there is any doubt as to the validity of a patent, grant
it, and let them go to court. i think that's the problem.

I won't ever understand source code copyright. I think it should not exist source copyright. It's just stupid. Think about a game. You buy a game, and it's copyrighted. That's ok, because it's a final product. It means, you are getting the game, the code, the musics, the textures, the models and whatever is at that product...

You buy a book, you get a final product: The story, the paper, the painting at the fist page, the printing, the autor biography... It's copyrighted book.

You buy Adobe Photoshop, it's a final product. It has a box, it has manual, it has media examples, it has help files... It's a copyrighted software.

Now, how in the earth, can source code be copyrighted?. It's just text, words, nothing more, nothing less... It's like you copyrighting the words in a book or ratter the sentences...
Besides, there're many simple programs which basically there's only one way to program...

int main()
{
printf("Hello");
return 0;
}

So... I will copyright the above, and everyone using the code above owns me fees... Sounds stupid, but think about it.... how can sourcecode be copyrighted?. I could take the program above, compile it and sell it as the Hello Program. It's a final product right? It's a program that will perform a "very useful" task. But the source cannot be copyrighted... how else will you print at the screen....

That's a good idea... I will try to get a patent to ";" which comes after all statments in C/C++... So everybody how uses it, owns me money. There's another way to do it though... Using ONLY if-then statments, which does not use ";"

Now seriously... I don't understand sourcecode copyrighting...

Since Hell froze over in November, where do I pickup my free SCO Linux License?

C'mon, this thread is fourteen years old.

And if you want to know more about how this case wound up (and how a former paralegal became a highly respected legal reporter ...), surf to http://groklaw.net.

You can read all the legal filings there. Including SCO's bankruptcy and disappearance.

Yes, it just doesn't pay to sue IBM.