patents

Michael M. nixlists at writemoore.net
Sat Apr 1 23:05:09 UTC 2006


mrwolff wrote:
>>
>>  
>>
> The one thing I never got about this stuff is why one of the large 
> corporations, for example IBM, doesn't just throw down a very large one 
> time sum of money to buy the rights to whatever they need to make it 
> free.  Especially since it is in the best interest of those companies to 
> promote and spread Linux.  If the cost is too great, what about a 
> partnership with a few other companies who extensively use Linux like 
> Novell, etc?  You might say the cost of doing that is too great, but I 
> haven't even heard of any of the corporations trying.  The same I think 
> could be done with other formats.

Why would they do that?  What's in it for IBM, or Novell?

The commercial distros already pay for the licenses -- if you buy 
Linspire, SuSE, Xandros, Mandriva, etc., you get MP3 support out of the 
box.  That's kind of a selling point.  So why would they shell out to 
help free (as in beer) distros that they are competing with?

-- 
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions 
of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to 
dream."  --S. Jackson




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