[GLLUG] following thread "Re: Newbie Installation fest?" but off topic...

Jolyon Michael Vincent vincen21 at msu.edu
Thu Sep 23 03:05:36 EDT 2004


Charles Ulrich writes: 

> On Monday 20 September 2004 13:33, Melson, Paul wrote:
>> It's definitely not open source the way Netscape/Mozilla is.  They use
>> some open source software (like GNOME 2 which is part of Solaris 9
>> also), but for the most part it seems to be business as usual for Intel
>> users.  Of course, sunfreeware.org has just about all of the open source
>> stuff you could want for Solaris.
> 
> Hmm. Maybe I misunderstood? I was going off the information presented the 
> following article. Has Sun since retracted it? (Wouldn't be the first 
> time...)

I saw the coolest thing today on G4tv (used to be TechTv.com) 

On the show Icons, they had a thing about Tetris. Apparently in 1988 they 
tried to liscence the rights from a Russian. Russians back then were cold 
war KGB types, and they even had an office similiar to todays Patent and 
TradeMark office in the states. This post made me think of the blurb on 
Nintendo's Tetris, because Atari tried to liscence the software under the 
assumption that the rights had already been secured from a head 
honcho-type...they weren't. In fact, the licensing had gone so far as to 
make it through the console market in the united states and even the gaming 
markets in Japan before the three major players discovered the rights still 
belonged to the Russians. The three guys (one from each respective company) 
took the next flight out to Russia to try to negotiate terms for the 
licensure to the USA/Japanese markets. They all made it in about the same 
time, and spent a few days going back and forth in meetings with the russian 
organization (very secretive!) that was probably headed up by the KGB. 

I'm probably botching this story, but the short of it is that you shouldn't 
assume you have the solution because you may find you don't have the rights 
to the thing you want most till you renegotiate the deal in the end. Which 
is where Nintendo came in. And won. 


Enjoy Tetris! 


J.



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