3 ms·
>It seems like a world w/o patents would simply strengthen MS and IBM. How so? One company off the top of my head is TomTom that would benefit to Microsoft's d
by sprout 16y ago
>It seems like a world w/o patents would simply strengthen MS and IBM.
How so? One company off the top of my head is TomTom that would benefit to Microsoft's detriment (VFat patent litigation; TomTom lost, MS won.)
IBM's hegemony is largely predicated on its mainframe-related patents. If anyone could write a clone they'd have their lunch eaten by FOSS same as Sun and the other big Unix vendors.
- kjrose 16y agoThis is actually more accurate than you'd think. While everyone used IBM PCs as their personal computers for many years, IBM was harmed massively when their PC BIOS was reverse engineered and then copied by Compaq (and subsequently many other computer manufacturers.) In fact, arguably, because that happened, we had a cheap IBM PC boom where software would work on multiple hardware platforms made by multiple different companies. This led to Microsoft's rise. Arguably, if they only sold on IBM-sold PCs, they would have made a lot of money, but nothing as meteoric as they did. Yes, not having a patent on something actually created the behemoth which is Microsoft.