[GTALUG] interesting new approach to forking

[Russell Reiter]

<SNIP PREVIOUS HISTORY>

>     TL;DR - OnePlus wanted to release the One in India, Cyanogen
>     backstabbed them by signing an exclusive deal with Micromax, OnePlus
>     got frustrated and decided to make their own ROM, Cyanogen accused
>     them of stealing from Cyanogen and their relationship is now very
>     rocky.

The whole question of theft of intellectual property is a pretty grey
area in the digital millennium. Is reverse engineering theft? if it
was Dell sure made it past the post on that one. There's lots of
mythos around the development of software. Didn't IBM open up their
architecture for a reason? wasn't that reason so the technology should
develop in a sustainable way? I seem to recall that  IBM originally
thought the worlds business computing could be reasonably done on two
or three mainframes through a distributed network.

So when PC bios intelligence features are reverse engineered, it's not
theft it's ummmmm creative math. Or perhaps the term New Math is
better.  More base 2ish. When push comes to shove it's all a numbers
game.

Bill Gates open letter to hobbyists comes to mind. A trade secret is
only valued as a trade secret when steps are taken to protect it. So
when Gates fails to secure the punch-tape and loses control of ALTAIR
BASIC and I'm assuming MITS MOBILE was engaging the "hobbyists" for an
open source intelligence reason, creative math is fair play.

Free beer, free software, free love all relics of the sixties. TANSTAAFL

Many years ago at a TLUG BOF I facilitated I asked John Hall about
emerging open source technology and the people who were most involved
in it's development. To paraphrase he said, the PHD's write the
software but it is the operators who use and perfect it.

So IMHO Gates is a real operator all right and he has a whole class of
people following in his footsteps. They want the thing to work just
well enough to make money but not so well that it doesn't need
constant upgrading and improvement.