First time subsurace usage surprises

John Van Ostrand john at netdirect.ca
Tue Jul 31 18:38:22 PDT 2012



----- Original Message -----
From: Lutz Vieweg [mailto:lvml at 5t9.de]
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2012 08:05 PM
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds at linux-foundation.org>
Cc: subsurface at hohndel.org <subsurface at hohndel.org>
Subject: Re: First time subsurace usage surprises

On 08/01/2012 01:48 AM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Some day in the future I hope we'll see something like bluetooth and
> inductive charging. Standard communication protocols, no pins, nasty
> battery changes.

... and the next day you awake and notice that Apple just sued the
manufacturer of that dive computer out of business because its round
knobs vaguely resembled some of theirs :-(

To me it seems that today even companies which would theoretically be
willing to hand out information on their hardware don't dare to do so,
because that would invite their competitors to sue them over trivial
patents.

Back in the late 80ies, I got documentation on some NCR graphics processor
from them under the simple condition that I would publish the
(NetBSD-)driver
code I wrote without adding explanatory comments to the sources.
Today they certainly wouldn't do that, being afraid that the docs reveal
a thousand chances for patent trolls.

Gouvernments should really end this madness. I guess I need to go to sleep
now before I get angry thinking of this too much ;-)

Regards,

Lutz Vieweg

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