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Re: The i2o Bus: A Conspiracy Against Free Software? (fwd)




O.K., chill out!

Your message is written as if you travelled to the future, and you already
know what is going to happen. There are more than one scenario possible
here, and it's hard to tell at advance how will things go.

I agree that the I20 terms were probably designed to give the commercial
companies a head start over the GPL and non-commercial OSes, yet I suggest
we keep the worrying phase for later. My company's CTO told me that it is
very hard to patent a driver, because one needs to patent one or more key
algorithms.  If someone else rewrites the driver with different algorithms,
there is nothing he can do about it.

There is no way to tell in advance how much I20 would be succesful, if
there will be competing standards, or if the entire concept will not be
acceptible. So far, my CTO haven't heard of it, but it didn't hit the
markets yet. 

I haven't heard of the TI 99/4 example (sorry), and I think wone should
agree that there is a difference between making keyboards with Win95 keys
to designing and manufacturing hardware for the I20 bus. As I said, I still
think that if HW companies will see that the I20 becomes too much of a
terror, they will split, and perhaps establish a rival technology.

	Shlomi Fish

BTW, looks like it's going to be a loooonggg thread... :-)



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Shlomi Fish                                Smart Link Ltd.
Home E-mail: shlomif@ibm.net               Work E-mail: shlomi@slink.co.il
Home Page: http://www.slink.co.il/~shlomi

"If I had not been insane already, I would have long ago driven myself mad."

                            The Enemy and how I Helped to Fight it.
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