8 Apr
2010
8 Apr
'10
1:59 p.m.
On Thu, 2010-04-08 at 15:20 -0500, Doc Shipley wrote:
On 4/8/10 2:44 PM, Brian Wheeler wrote:
I think they do make make money from it.
On Thu, 2010-04-08 at 12:43 -0600, Eric Smith
wrote:
s/make from it/pour into it/
Let the flames begin.... ;)
The TurboHercules people wrote a snotty letter to
IBM along
the lines of "nyah, nyah, we can use your processor architecture because
it isn't patented", and IBM pointed out that they do in fact have a
bunch of patents on it, which TurboHercules *might* be infringing.
And I think this is the key here. As soon as IBM replied it got covered
on a pile of open source websites as "IBM hates open source" which
seemed a bit fishy considering how much money they make from it... OTOH, IBM spent huge money on Linux for many years
before they saw a
dime out of it. In the '90s, a lot of the developers at the Austin
campus released a crapload of kernel code under their own names because
IBM Legal was so leery of the GPL. A significant portion of the Linux
kernel was written by IBM, sometimes officially and often not. Same for
apache, as far as that goes. And then there's Hercules, and and and.
I don't know if I'd call it a significant portion, but there is a lot of
IBM code in there. If it were significantly IBM I'm sure some waning
unix company would have sued them by now :)