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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