( Re Message From: Hamish Moffatt )
>
> G'day Bruce. Thought you might be interested to know,
> there was an article in the Australian Personal Computer magazine
[ snip ]
> "The most likely victim of this 'commercialised standard' would be
> the many flavours of Linux, the public domain, freeware operating system
> based on Unix...."
[ snip ]
> 'It's a closed standard, it requires a NDA, and
> you need a license to develop software for it.'"
Assuming this assessment is correct (and why not?), I think the key
question is:
Will it in due course become, for practical purposes, impossible
to practice computing without these I20 thingies?
When I started using Linux 5 years ago I installed SLS off a dozen
floppies onto a 486-DX25 with 4MB RAM and 40MB HDD. Nowadays, 16MB RAM,
500MB HDD and a CDROM are almost indispensible; then, and for the next few
years, the CDROM, at least, was a luxury.
So what augmented functionality will flow from I20? Or will it simply be
the case that with the passage of time it will become so difficult to find
non-I20 kit that for practical purposes that will be all that's possible?
(Just as it's not so easy now to find a 5-1/4" floppy drive if you need
one).
Bruce's description of the "closed standard" makes the situation sound
like driving a car, which you can't do in most countries without passing
a driving test, paying an annual licence fee for the vehicle, in some
cases paying toll charges for certain roads, parking-meter fess etc.
That would make PC+I20 usage an activity which the industry had
encapsulated into a money-milkable cow.
I suppose existing PC users who want to stick with Linux/FreeBSD etc could
simply stick with their non-I20 boxes which with time would acquire the
status of wooden plough-shares. Alternatively, people may start to migrate
to non-PC machines: If you want to use UNIX in one form or another you
could buy HP, SUN or DEC-ALPHA hardware -- Linux runs on the ALPHA at
least! They're more expensive, but not THAT much more.
In practice, however, I cannot see I20 being around for very long before
the anarchic element suss it out and distribute its characteristics for
free -- it may be self-defeating. So is this in practice a story which
looks scary but need not cause us serious worry?
Finally, can I seek clarification of "you need a license to develop
software for it"? There must be a limit on this: If I wanted to write a C
program to perform some trivial task which implicated an I20 peripheral
(as people do all the time now for non-I20), would I have to get a
licence? Would the portions of the code which have to do with the
peripheral be in some sense the property of the I20 consortium? This looks
crazy to me, unless all the I20-specific code was wrapped up in the OS.
Best wishes,
Ted. ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
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