3 ms·
Don't forget that probably the only reason you can do a lot of that is because AT&T screwed up so badly legally back in the day, and lost many of their rights t
by southern_cross 8y ago
Don't forget that probably the only reason you can do a lot of that is because AT&T screwed up so badly legally back in the day, and lost many of their rights to Unix in the process. And if SCO had been successful in reasserting their rights to it not that long ago, you still might not be able to do it.
IBM, on the other hand, has always competently (and sometimes quite viciously) protected their products legally. They also have a massive patent portfolio, or at least they used to.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> IBM, on the other hand, has always competently (and sometimes quite viciously) protected their products legally. Viciously, perhaps. Competently...well, the Wintel PC market—long ago “The IBM-compatible PC market” might be an indicator that they can fall down hard on that.
- southern_cross 8y agoIIRC, Compaq (remember them?) managed to come up with a clean-room PC BIOS clone, which started that whole ball rolling. Then, after IBM tried to re-establish control with the MCA (which folks pretty much immediately started trying to work around in various nefarious ways), Compaq also came up with EISA, which kind of blew that out of the water. In fact, IBM's original decision to work with mostly off-the-shelf parts in designing their PC (instead of home-grown stuff) pretty much came back to bite them here, but they were still in the PC/server business for quite a long time. As for their other hardware, these days they're pretty much the only game in town for mainframe and midrange systems. And they jealously guard those markets, as lethargic as these may currently be.