> If I'm Microsoft, I can tell Dell to ship a copy of Office with every PC
> or I'll decline to license them my OS and put them out of business.
If you're Dell, and you freely chose to build your business model around
a piece of software made by someone else who could put you out of business
by not licensing it to you, you /deserve/ to go out of business.
You can't have it both ways--you seem to think that it's OK to make
yourself dependent on someone else, then cry foul when they take
advantage of it.
> If I'm IBM and I don't like something your startup is doing, I can do a
> search on my patent database, find a couple of dozen you could plausibly
> be violating, and - right or wrong - bankrupt you in court.
Patents are government force, though you're right that I would hold IBM
morally responsible for using it. But again, presumably the people seem
to think patents are a good idea, but you don't want IBM to take advantage
of the power you've given them.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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