this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
130 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
59963 readers
3257 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
These IBM folks need to have a chat with whatever department recently agreed to open-source MS-DOS 4.00 (IBM had joint control with Microsoft), because they know full-well that third-party copyright-free largely MS-DOS compatible products exist and have existed for quite some time now.
This is the same deal but with their bigger iron.
Now it's true that there were a few DOS clones that somehow fell afoul of copyright that were killed off pretty quick, but the only other way to get DOS-compatibility is by... reverse engineering.
And if they sued about that, they must have lost because alternative DOS clones continue to exist.
The only caveat I can see here is that the successful clones are open-source and free of cost.
If this company are charging anything at all, that could be the angle of attack. It might be the only angle of attack.
But I'm not a lawyer and have probably missed something blindingly obvious. Or devious.