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The answer is obviously “money”. An MIT researcher’s legacy will be that he withheld a huge piece of computing history from the world for personal gain. What a
by BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
The answer is obviously “money”. An MIT researcher’s legacy will be that he withheld a huge piece of computing history from the world for personal gain. What a stain.
- marcus0x62 3y agoWhat money? In what alternate universe is a well-heeled investor or commercial entity going to pay a bunch of money for an ancient single-user operating system written in and for a language that, let's be honest, almost nobody uses?
- BaculumMeumEst 3y agoWhy would there be a stipulation for non-commercial use if this isn’t about money?
- marcus0x62 3y agoMaybe the owner thinks Genera will become more valuable in the future? My point is I don't see any possibility of that actually happening. I'd imagine there is some revenue for maintenance/bug fixes of existing installations (David Schmidt has apparently been running the hardware maintenance/support side of things for quite some time,) but I don't see how the software does anything other than get less valuable commercially with every passing year.
- BaculumMeumEst 3y ago> I don't see how the software does anything other than get less valuable commercially with every passing year That’s the worst part of all this. It’s not like he’s sitting on a goldmine, he’s hoarding something of immense historical value because it’s slightly more beneficial for him to do so than it would be to share it. I can’t imagine steering your legacy from being immortalized as an MIT AI researcher to… that.
- Zigurd 3y agoThere is enough money sloshing around in tech that it is plausible someone or some company would buy it for a lot more than Mallery paid for it. It was probably bought for, at most, a few thousand US$, on a lark. It's a lottery ticket.