DELL owns the actual, physical box they make, but DELL can't
take action against you or against me for making our own,
EXACT REPLICA (minus the trademark) of their PC and selling it,
perhaps at a fraction of their price. Neither you, nor I
could do the same with an Ultra without facing legal action from
Sun. Get it????
DELL owns many patents on the boxes they make. Just try making an
exact duplicate minus the trademark and see what happens.
From Company Sleuth:
Listing all new patents granted in the last 1 month
PATENT No. DESCRIPTION
5,978,860 System and method for disabling and re-enabling at
least one peripheral device in a computer system by
masking a device-configuration-space-access-signal with
a disable or re-enable signal
5,978,856 System and method for reducing latency in layered
device driver architectures
5,978,210 Two-piece flex circuit bobbin for portable computers
5,975,735 Method and apparatus for mounting a peripheral device
5,974,573 Method for collecting ECC event-related information
during SMM operations
5,974,544 Method and controller for defect tracking in a redundant
array
5,974,497 Computer with cache-line buffers for storing prefetched
data for a misaligned memory access
5,973,485 Method and apparatus for a multiple stage sequential
synchronous regulator
5,973,225 Isolation and characterization of a gene encoding a low
molecular weight glutenin
5,969,939 Computer with docking station for docking and cooling
the computer
5,965,842 Low impedance connection for an EMI containment shield
including metal plating bonded to the shielded equipment
through openings in a conductive ribbon
I'm not saying that MSFT doesn't own their O/S. I'm saying
that any O/S written for the PC should be in the public domain,
including MSFT's. Yes, that means that they would have to
divest themselves of the O/S products that they have developed
over the years.
That means that api's, libs, utils, language processors, testing
tools, O/S, device drivers etal. that run on Personal Computers
would belong to the public.
MSFT would still be free to develop ANY proprietary application
it wanted that would run on this O/S. They could continue to
sell it to anyone they wanted and price it any way they wanted.
You see, this just doesn't follow. Why should the OS be in the
public domain just because there's an open specification for the
hardware? And why do you find a difference between the OS and
application programs? Many things that used to be apps or utilities
are now distributed as part of the OS, such as defragmenters and
Internet Browsers. And why do you consider things like utilities,
compilers, testing tools, etc to part of the OS and not applications?
BTW, since Java is just a Language Processor and it does indeed run
on a PC then it should be in the public domain by your
argument, and not owned, controlled, or licensed by Sun in
any way. |
