4 ms·

I wish they had patented truly novel ideas like pipes, hierarchical file systems and "everything is a file" and then licensed it so that anyone releasing softwa

I wish they had patented truly novel ideas like pipes, hierarchical file systems and "everything is a file" and then licensed it so that anyone releasing software under an open source license can use them and not others. That would have put an end to others like Microsoft, Apple etc from taking all these innovations and then further "innovate" with 'phones with rounded edges' or 'performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data', patent them and extort money out of free software. Not that there was any way they could have known that.

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
I wouldn't say Microsoft or Apple stole these concepts. Patents are horrible. Those proprietary systems would exist anyway, but without patents, the users of them can also benefit from these ideas. Are you aware that Apple's OS X is actually based on the original UNIX source code? There's nothing proprietary about that.
- FroshKiller 12y ago
  That isn't really true. OS X is based on BSD, which is not "the original UNIX." The original Unix was closed source and was actually quite proprietary.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    BSD is derived from the original UNIX. There is probably code in OS X that ran on PDP-11s once.
    - ptx 12y ago
      None of the original code is left, though. Mac OS X is based on (for the Unixy bits) FreeBSD and NetBSD, which are based on 4.4BSD-Lite, which was BSD with all the AT&T-derived parts chopped off. See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution#4.4BSD_and_descendants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution#...
GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
Yes I think we can all agree that the history of unix did not have enough intellectual property lawsuits.