9fans archive / 2000 / 10 / 69 /    prev next

From: Lucio De Re <lucio@pro...>
Subject: Re: [9fans] Are nvidia-cards working with plan9?
Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2000 11:49:25 +0200

On Mon, Oct 09, 2000 at 09:05:26AM +0000, jiho@smt... wrote:
> Message-ID: <39e0c6c7$1@new...>
> Organization: University of Bath Computing Services, UK
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> References: <20001005151052.3FEAB199DE@mail>
> Subject: Re: [9fans] Are nvidia-cards working with plan9?
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> In article <20001005151052.3FEAB199DE@mail>,
> 
> Actually, I wasn't laying blame, I was just alluding
> to _de_facto_ reality.
> 
Well, Wall Street is just a special-interest group :-)

> There's a small matter of U.S. anti-trust law, and a
> principle known as "fair access to essential
> facilities".  It dates back to the railroad tycoons,
> fer cryin' out loud.  Ironically, the case has been
> made against Microsoft software.  It's even more
> obvious with respect to chips, but as far as I know
> (not very far) no one has tried making the case.
> 
The stated reason for not pursuing the case with the full might of
the law was that _all_ IT companies had broken the law for years
(software that ran only on some hardware, applications that ran
only on given operating environment, etc) and the can of worms
would have been far too big a problem...

So we're lumped with legislation without teeth.  And the rest of
the world is hardly likely to step into the US Government shoes
and risk technological boycotts while they try to catch up :-(

++L