[ILUG] Re: ILUG sends s/w patents briefing document to Irish MEPs

[Niall O Broin]

On 21 Mar 2005, at 23:36, Joseph Kiniry wrote:

> On 21 Mar, 2005, at 21:03, Paul O'Malley wrote:
>> Another aside :) My previous TCP/IP comment was referring to the fact 
>> that without a common unowned intercommunication standard the net 
>> would not have happened. I omitted the information about Linux and 
>> other OSS platforms allowed the commercial event (Internet growth) 
>> that disrupted  communications so much that we now look at a totally 
>> different communications landscape from that of 10 years ago.
>
> But TCP/IP *did* happen without FOSS.  All the original 
> implementations predate the GNU Project by over 15 years, for example.

Paul didn't mention FOSS in the context of TCP/IP. He said "a common 
unowned intercommunication standard" was essential to the genesis of 
the net. Although the original standards were owned (I think DoD money 
paid for them) they were free for all to use, and so they were very 
similar in their availability to open source software today, and that 
freedom was important to their wide adoption.

The only comparable protocol (and in many ways of course it's NOT 
comparable, but it was also very widely used) that springs to mind was 
IPX but it was an owned protocol, and was used only by one company, or 
to interwork with that company's products. I imagine there are many 
readers of this list don't even know what IPX is.



Niall