Chris Maresca wrote:
Well, the fact it is, both Bill and Award have more than enough money to sue this project out of existance. Just look at what happened to KIllustrator just for using a similar name, and that was just with a letter from a lawyer*.
What is it with you folks? Always so shit-scared of Micro$oft?
Let me tell you something about Apple, Micro$oft, Sun and all the other merry pirates of Silicon Valley. They STOLE all their code.
Billy G. was the worst hypocrite of all. He wrote angry letters to Homebrew, and yet he ripped of IBM to get x86DOS, and basically rename is MS-DOS. The guy is a fraud.
The source code is proprietary, and has copyright notices all over it. So what? If we open up the hood of a rolls-royce and look at the way it's built, and try our best to produce a superior engine based on that knowledge...it classes as an educational exercise, man.
That may be what you think, and I don't disagree. But that's not the way the law works. To think otherwise is just naive.
I know the law just like you. And the Law sux on this occasion.
Just dont get caught. Sun and Apple knew that, when they ripped off Xerox's work.
The fact is that Award work hard and spent lots of money writing and developing their code. As projects like this and linuxbios show, it's non-trivial to develop such a product. I think they have a right to make money from stuff they've spend years building.
Award are NOT A CHARITY. They are a profit-making organization. They should not exist in my view. BIOS should not exist in my view; it should all be done via the OS.
Everyone knows that BIOS calls are inefficient. Award are making money out of other's misery. Imagine all the man-hours lost in total, from folks waiting for their machines to boot through BIOS...it's homocide!
Better that we come up with something better. Apple had the better idea. They didnt need sh£%ty BIOS and they knew it. They let the OS handle it all. And it WAS better.