Re: extropians-digest V3 #82

Cynthia Allingham (allingham@ioc.net)
Wed, 09 Sep 1998 07:45:26 -0700

> >Microsoft is precisely the kind of organisation which couldn't exist in a
> >free market without tax-funded copyright enforcement.
>
> A system in which copyright owners funded the enforcement would almost
> certainly have produced the same kind of results.

I think the idea that copyright law instead of patent law should protect an operating system is wrong. A operating system is a key technology without which, all the software written for that operating system won't run.

And if patent law applied, then Microsoft would have to publish their technical information (source code) and their rights to the patent would eventually expire.

And if the source code were published, thousands of hackers would change, debug, and speed up windows. We would still have to pay for windows, but Microsoft could not continue to produce low quality products and force the rest of us to use it.