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Comment by ChickeNES | Hacker News Reader

You picked the Personal Computer, the product of hacker culture, open architectures (the IBM/Phoenix/Compaq story alone makes your example hilarious), clones, open source, and a software scene so filled with piracy that Bill Gates himself wrote the “Open Letter to Hobbyists”, as your example for why copyright was indispensable? LMFAO

PS: look up the cover of the reissued Lions’ “Commentary on UNIX”

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> PS: look up the cover of the reissued Lions’ “Commentary on UNIX”

Hey, weirdly enough, I don't need to, because I have a copy of it that I bought the week it was reissued, during his lifetime, from which AFAIK he made money, as the author?

I know that story and I don't think you really understand, actually, that the Lions book folklore is not actually a story of abusing or invalidating Lions' copyright.

But Bill Gates didn't make the PC. IBM did. And it was not aimed at hacker culture: it was aimed at business, at writers, at publishers, at a knowledge industry that exists only as a result of copyright.

You think the IBM/Phoenix/Compaq story exists outside copyright? All of that is grounded in copyright. Again, PC clones exist because of clean-room techniques, within copyright. Not in ignorance or contravention of it.

Open source licences are all grounded in copyright.

This is just weird gish-galloping of unrelated concepts now.

A gish gallop is attacking the opposing side with a flurry of different arguments, I merely supplied a long list of rebuttals to your assertion we would not have the PC without copyright. I included the IBM mention because I assumed you meant “Personal Computer” not “IBM PC”, as the latter, while vastly important in its own right, is still eclipsed by the PC as a concept. The world would be different without the IBM PC, while the world would be much MUCH poorer without computers in every home and/or pocket. The IBM lineage might be resilient, but we could just as easily have had a (non-Apple) NeXT, Magic Cap, PSION, Be, Amiga, etc descendant as predominant computing platforms instead. And my point with the Lions book, is that it’s emblematic of the control AT&T exerted on Unix, instead of letting it be free, where they (and descendants USL and SCO) attempted but failed to squash an open information revolution (*BSD and Linux) that had been seeded by Unix to begin with.

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