Re: News - Commercial Version of Hercules - Turbo Hercules

--- In [email protected], "floyds_void" <gsmith@...> wrote:
>
> I just looked at the very first one, 7624237, 
> "Compare, swap and store facility with no external 
> serialization".

Note how they even went to the effort to say:

"Moreover, an environment may include an emulator (e.g., software or other emulation mechanisms), in which a particular architecture or subset thereof is emulated."


In other words, they are indeed attempting to
prevent anyone else from using the published
language.

Completely ruling out any competition.

If this was a technique that IBM used internally
for their own software/firmware and was not part
of the published spec, it would be reasonable.

But once they publish the op codes for people to
write their applications, competitors have NO
CHOICE but to faithfully execute those same
instructions, exactly, in order to run the
application software.

Perhaps if IBM published a slower version of z/OS
that didn't use those instructions, and no application
software was allowed to use those instructions,
maybe it would be acceptable. That's only a distant
maybe.

But a common published language for application
programmers shouldn't be patentable.

And honestly, if our capitalist countries allow
someone to patent the language like that, ruling
out all competition, we may as well be living in
North Korea running GNU/Red Star Linux.

And in the meantime, someone needs to get cracking
on a z/OS clone. And preferably use a higher level
language like C to generate the code, without any
of the patented op codes. So someone needs to get
cracking on a C compiler that generates S/390
or similar instructions that are outside the
patents. And in order for the C programs to run,
we'll need a C runtime library. So someone needs
to get cracking on a C runtime library that is free
of any restrictions.

BFN.  Paul.