🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Oct29.122921.24775@donau.et.tudelft.nl> thomas@duteca4.et.tudelft.nl (Thomas Okken) writes:

   Why weren't the LPF urging a boycott of AT&T when they suddenly decided they
   owned some vital patent, and started demanding license payments for X?
   Whenever the Apple boycott is defended, people point out that it's visible
   and all that, and when the LPF's decision not to sanction AT&T is defended,
   we hear the good ol' argument that "you can't get them all anyway".

   [...]  As is pointed out above, the massive sales of MS-DOS
   machines have hurt the industry enormously, by saddling the best-selling
   hardware platform with a laughable excuse for an operating system. Yet no
   one points the finger at Microsoft for this.

Apparently you haven't been keeping up with gnu.misc.discuss and other
FSF/LPF and related forums.  I've been seeing tons of finger-pointing at
AT&T and Microsoft.  But I don't know whether Microsoft has tried suing
anyone selling an OS that has a similar look-and-feel to MS-DOS or PC-DOS;
I do know that Apple has done so for its Macintosh interface.  Both systems
borrowed heavily from what came before, and what they borrowed from included
a lot of government-, industry-, and university-sponsored research.  Only
Apple, as far as I know, now claims to own the codified and successfully
marketed results of those borrowings.

Your post strongly suggests you are aware only of attacks on Apple and
completely unaware of attacks on other companies.  I have seen a lot of
both in these forums, but then that's probably because I take none of those
attacks personally.
--

James Craig Burley, Software Craftsperson    burley@gnu.ai.mit.edu