About the calculus for the project [LWN.net]

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 10, 2012 17:15 UTC (Fri) by landley (guest, #6789)
In reply to: About the calculus for the project by khim
Parent article: A tempest in a toybox

> That's different question. I know that the legal system can and does
> forbid people from doing new things that compete with their own previous
> work.

Not in California or Texas it doesn't. ("Right to work" states.) There's rather a lot of case law on this. Silicon Valley was _built_ on the "traitorous eight" from Shockley Semiconductor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

Honestly, if you work in the industry you get to know this stuff...

Rob

(Oratroll is suing over patents, sounds like they're attempting to establish treble damages for wilful violation, ala http://www.ipwatchdog.com/patent/advanced-patent/patent-i... . Which is in fact the reason Linus gives for not reading software patents.)

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About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 10, 2012 17:38 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

Honestly, if you work in the industry you get to know this stuff...

Sure. These tales are very well-known. But that happened half-century ago. Companies worked diligently to rectify "the problem" all that time. Today the outcome of such lawsuit is quite different to predict.

Oratroll is suing over patents

Nope. Copyrights are very much in dispute, too. And outcome is not yet certain. And I'm sure if Oracle will be repelled this time then it'll cooperate with Disneys and SONYs of the world to change the law to make sure next time they'll win.

In fact the whole SFC "problem" have one trivial and quite logical solution: change the law, reduce copyright power and make what SFC is doing illegal. Sadly Disneys and SONYs of the world reject this solution out of hand because it'll reduce their copyright power, too. Well, as long as that's the case don't expect me to feel any sympathy to their plight. They brought it on themselves.