Re: News - Commercial Version of Hercules - Turbo Hercules

--- In [email protected], Mike Schwab <Mike.A.Schwab@...> wrote:
>
> > They shouldn't be able to patent this since we were 
> > doing exactly this years before the filing, should they?
> 
> VM and various other emulators were doing that in the 1960s.

This patent only covers people doing emulation of
this one instruction, which is recent.

I am not familiar with timing issues. As was pointed
out (I think), they appear to have filed the patent 
years after the instruction was created and people
were already emulating it. But even assuming that
their timing is acceptable, and they're allowed to
patent something after people have spent a lot of
effort creating it - WHAT OTHER FRIGGIN CHOICE
IS THERE TO MAKE A COMPATIBLE MACHINE TO RUN Z/OS
AND ITS APPLICATIONS??? IBM asserting this is
simply saying "we don't want any competition for
our hardware, so you can't run z/OS software on
anything other than our hardware".

You literally may as well be living in North Korea
when your only choice of hardware is the one that
Kim Jong Il gives you.

Or a bit closer - Kim Jong Il says you can use
his official hardware if you wish to be able to
display Korean characters on your screen.

However, if you are one of those horrible
anti-People's Republic of Canada, I mean, Korea,
there is another option available - there is Swahili
hardware available so you can display Swahili
characters on your screen. Technically,
anything you can do in Korean you can also do
in Swahili, so it's just a matter of translating
every Korean book ever written into Swahili,
and getting all those Korean people you interact
with to learn Swahili too, and you're home and hosed.
Well, hosed, anyway.

What could be fairer than that?

The software industry as a whole has a lot to 
answer for. Nearly as much as Korean dictators
starving their population. These Europeans like
to act all high and mighty about how they are
independent from the US and have their own
policy (e.g. supporting Middle Eastern dictators
instead of toppling them). So how about they use
that independence to do something good for a
change and declare these patents null and void?

Not sure what happens after that though. Force
IBM to sell z/OS at what price? And what if they
still refuse or charge something outlandish to
effectively refuse? Drop copyright protection 
for z/OS?

Honestly, if there's ever been a time for
government to get involved in industry, it's to
break monopolies. There should be an international
governmental project to provide public domain
replacements for the operating systems that have
managed to establish monopolies, and put the
price of everything on the planet up as a result.

Why do we have an international space station but
not an international operating system?

BFN.  Paul.