Messages in this thread | | | From | Jesse Pollard <> | Subject | Re: Why DRM exists [was Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!] | Date | Thu, 1 May 2003 07:43:17 -0500 |
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On Wednesday 30 April 2003 10:55, Jeff Randall wrote: > On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 08:20:41AM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote: > > My point wasn't about theft, it was about reimplementation. > > I stand behind that point, what I've seen for more than a decade is > > reimplementation after reimplementation. I'm not saying there is no > > value to that or that it is illegal or that there are no improvements > > (compare Unix diff to GNU diff if you want to see some imrovements). > > There is tons of value in having free versions of useful tools. > > There is also tons of value in the creation of new work. > > > > What I haven't seen is a lot of revolutionary work. All of that seems > > to come from commercial companies and at a pretty slow pace. There are > > a lot of false starts, commercial failures, whatever. But a few slam > > dunks as well. > > Mosaic was pretty revolutionary for it's time.. as was Sendmail.. > source was available for both from the start.
Mosaic is/was derived from two sources - gopher for network communication (derived from network news and/or e-mail) and SGML combined with display only word processor applications (postscript and pdf previewers).
sendmail was derived from a message routing protocol originally using UUCP, written to promote research in message routing, and flexibility to reduce the re-implementation time required on earlier applications. (somewhere there is a quote from Eric Allman along the lines of "...If I had known how popular it would become I would have asked for a dime for each installation...")
Neither looked revolutionary at the time. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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