From: Cynthia Allingham (allingham@ioc.net)
Date: Wed Sep 09 1998 - 08:45:26 MDT
> >Microsoft is precisely the kind of organisation which couldn't exist in a
> >free market without tax-funded copyright enforcement.
>
> A system in which copyright owners funded the enforcement would almost
> certainly have produced the same kind of results.
I think the idea that copyright law instead of patent law
should protect an operating system is wrong. A operating
system is a key technology without which, all the software
written for that operating system won't run.
And if patent law applied, then Microsoft would have to
publish their technical information (source code) and their
rights to the patent would eventually expire.
And if the source code were published, thousands of hackers
would change, debug, and speed up windows. We would still
have to pay for windows, but Microsoft could not continue to
produce low quality products and force the rest of us to use
it.
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