Re: Promise SATA driver GPL'd

Richard B. Johnson
2003-07-24T13:44:34Z

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Jesse Pollard wrote:

> On Wednesday 23 July 2003 19:21, David Schwartz wrote:
> >
> > No matter how much code I write for which I don't give you the source, the
> > amount of code for which you do have the source is not reduced. The more
> > free code there is, the freer you are. The only thing that threatens your
> > freedom is if someone makes free code unfree. How do they do that?
>
> By claiming they wrote it first, supplying enough lawyers and court fees to
> put you out of existance.
>

Or by just stealing it and selling it like "Flight Simulator" (1). Simple.
If you have enough lawyers on your staff, you can steal anything. Nobody
can touch you.

(1) Flight Simulator was first written under CP/M for a VT-50 terminal
my me. The source code as published by the PROGRAM EXCHANGE, my BBS
System. When PCs became commonplace, I converted it to run on a PC
and learned Intel x86 assembly in the process. The newer version(s)
were published on the PROGRAM EXCHANGE BBS that I ran for about 20
years. Then when "Turbo Pascal" became available, it was adapted to
interface with graphics and a Hercules graphics card. This work was
done by myself and others. In the process, I learned Pascal. Eventually
PCs had screen cards that did low-resolution graphics. Further refinements
were made for graphics on these. Several of my PROGRAM EXCHANGE
contributors wrote loadable area graphics and maps.

When Microsoft released their first version of "Flight Simulator" they
didn't even bother to change the name. Also, they apparently thought
that putting it on self-booting disks would make it difficult to
see what they copied. My flight dynamics kernel, that ran off the
timer-tick, was copied verbatim. This is the basic state-machine
that makes the software "fly". It had the dynamics of a Cessna 172,
complete with the spiral instability, and the long-mode oscillations.
It was difficult to fly because it flew like a real airplane, i.e.,
you reduce the power and the nose drops and the airplane accelerates.

This is not intuitive. Who would think (but a real pilot) that reducing
the power setting would make the speed increase? Eventually Microsoft
"fixed" the flight dynamics, probably by writing their own. This made
the program a mere toy that anybody could fly.

So, they took a real simulator, with real flight dynamics and converted
it to a toy. In the process, they made millions of dollars. Sounds like
a good deal to me. All you need is lawyers.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.20 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).
Note 96.31% of all statistics are fiction.