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Cymro stopped drinking long enough to mumble
 Um...OK. Even with our Free marketeering ways, we have a bucketload of anti-trust laws and the like to protect consumers. To me this falls under that category |
How is this antitrust? Software companies have an advantage in the market that's not been seen before. They have the ability to construct and sell a product that can't be reverse engineered unless they themselves release the designs (code). That may suck balls if you're a smaller startup looking to take advantage of Microsofts or EAs success, but it's not antitrust. Source code can easily and justifiably be labeled trade secrets.
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Cymro stopped drinking long enough to mumble
And I'm not saying MS should be obliged to license the use and sale of it's technology. What I'm saying is that MS should be obliged not to legally or in any other way prohibit paying customers from modyifying their software when they've paid for it. |
No, what you're saying is that MS and other software companies should be forced to release the source code to their products. Well great, so you mean to tell me that nobody is going to get their hands on that code and write a GNU version of the software. Sure, MS will sue, but by the time they get around to it, it'll be way beyond stopping it. That doesn't exactly seem fair to MS if you ask me.
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Cymro stopped drinking long enough to mumble
And as far as I'm aware, there's nothing Sony can do if Toshiba decides to buy in a few thousand BR players, modify them and re-sell them. |
Yeah there is, they can sue the pants off them for patent violations. It's the same as the software model I proposed earlier with Windows. The difference is, it's a hell of alot harder to go through all that code and prove it, than it is to rip open a blue ray player.