>
you're reckoning the meal I ate last night was not my property.
Permanence doesn't mean it will always be one's property, but that it will be so until he chooses to dispose of it or the law determines otherwise in some special circumstance as public need for disappropriation.
Patents and copy rights aren't patents because they are a concession of a private monopoly; the law doesn't need to create a special case of public need for disappropriation. It was never property, just a limited time concession of exclusive rights.
>
the contents of my mind, my thoughts, my creativity, are my property
Until you choose to publish them, when they become public. The State chooses to give you limited exclusive rights for a determined period to incite you to express them for public benefit in the first place.
>
if you write a book and are rejected for publication by a publisher but find out later that they DID publish your book and kept the proceeds themselves they HAVE stolen something from you
Not in the absence of copyrights. Before copyrights, one had to make sure of not allowing copies. For example, one didn't lend his manuscript for more time than necessary for reading -- copying took much longer. Remember, the goal of copy rights and patents is to incite publication.
>
The ownership of a copyright
Have you notice the subtlety? Copy rights aren't property, they themselves are owned. Only they are not property, but a temporary monopoly.
>
Subject to the provisions of this title, patents shall have the attributes of personal property
Another subtlety... saying patents shall have the attributes of property is subject to provisions subtracts some of the attributes of personal property, such as permanence.
Now I will concede that intellectual property has recently been inserted in the statutes books. This is a victory for those who use them as propaganda terms, but it doesn't make the concept any more legitimate than once personal property of another people (slavery, the Roman patriarcal powers) was once thought to be.
>
The best I could give him was that Linux is a hobby OS
Only that's not true. It is a professional system made by its users, while MS Windows is a substandard one made by hired coders commanded by marketers trying to please the users' managers. Got the difference?
>
That gives pluses and minuses to each of them
The only GNU/Linux minus is time: it takes time to get it right. There is no reason why, say, Debian GNU/Linux with Gnome can't reach all the same qualities of MS Windows without loosing any benefits. That is, apart from the fact that security is inherently opposed to convenience. There are things that will always be more difficult simply to keep security; on the other hand the basic design is so much simpler that the complexity coming from security can easily be offset, especially if we eventually follow the GNU/Hurd road to Lisp system programming and the Gnome road to database storage as the filesystem engine.
>
consistency across apps
This is a red herring. Gnome is already quite consistent, and has most apps one needs. 2.6 will need even less non-Gnome apps, such as Gnome PDF viewer being nearly as feature-complete as XPDF or Adobe Acrobat Reader for instance. It will take a few years, but there is no reason why OpenOffice.org, LyX and such foreign software won't be totally Gnome-ised and immature software such as Passepartout or Gnome PDF won't become full-featured.
>
integration
Another red herring. In fact, it is much easier to integrate GNU/Linux, because it tends to follow open standards and even to create new open standards, instead of being subject to MS's bad case of NIHS. MS integrates well only with MS or other mature proprietary MS-platform software, but not with non-MS-platform software.
>
Linux could really benefit from some of the aspects of Windows, such as centralization and consistency across the UI in every app
Centralisation would buy you precisely nothing, and would cost much. With centralisation things would move slower, be less flexible...
Consistency is yet another non-issue. Gnome and KDE are still pretty immature, but they are consistent. The fact that you can run Qt apps in Gnome and Gtk+ ones in KDE, and text and Motif or Athena or whatever in both, is a bonus.
In fact it has been argued that if we had had a single widget set since the dawn of X, now we'd have tons of obsolete software. As widgets were never a given, people have designed their apps to be easily ported to new ones, and now we have the luxury of apps that play well with lotsa them. For example, with GNU Emacs we've curses and Motif already, and will have Gtk+ soon; with LyX we have Qt and XForms already, and someone was porting to Gtk+... MS Windows apps so old as these were already rewritten or are dead or have become bloated, choose any number of these three options.
>
he hoped that its influence was going to get Microsoft off their rear ends and improve their product
It is happening all the time, but the cultural gap is simply too big. Microsoft will only be able to cross it by ceasing to be Microsoft. In this sense the decision by the courts not to break Microsoft in several companies (games and content, OS, tools, apps, servers) was against MS own shareholders' best interests in the long term. But this is a decision shareholders could have taken without the courts.
>
whichever OS can meet the other in the middle--with a balance of security, usability, and power
As I've shown it is not about balance, but about GNU maturing.
>
I think you are being (or trying to be) pedantic
No, it is just that 'upgrading' trademarks, copy rights and patents to a general category of property tends to extend them by association with real property, when they in fact need to be limited instead of extended.
It shouldn't matter, but we think by analogy.
>
Intellectual property has all the attributes that define "property" - the rights (even limited rights) are owned, the holder of the rights (patent, trademark, copy-right) has exclusive legal title to them, he can enjoy them or dispose of them as he will, they can be bought or sold or given away as a gift. This is the definition of the term "property".
There is one more requirement to consider something property: permanence and ownership. Copy rights and patents aren't permanent, and they are not actually owned by their holders, rather they are conceded by the State.
In the natural state one can own by force or tradition; not so with ideas or expression. The State concedes exclusive rights for a determined period to foster creation, but this does not property make, nor you will find the term in the statutes books. It was actually applied as a propaganda device by the constituents of the WIPO. One can argue that if patents are useful they are too long nowadays and anyway their application to software is too fuzzy to be useful, and that copy rights are contraproducent nowadays.
>
tried to upgrade a few distros to 2.6 and things didn't go very well (kernel panic)
Had that with Debian, 2.6.2 worked like a charm. 2.6.3 got me the panic again, so I'm 2.6.2 still. Waiting for a fix for the ext3-on-LVMv2 bug to go production.
>
I disagree, intellectual property most certainly DOES exist.
It doesn't. Patents do exist, copy rights do exist, but intellectual property is just a meaningless agregation of both plus trademarks. BTW none is a form of property, but limited rights of quite different types both among themselves and from property rights.
I never said patents aren't valid in themselves. Software patents specifically are illegitimate, and I believe copy rights are long surviving their usefulness, but these are other issues.
>
If SCO pulled a magic rabbit out of there but and somehow proved they had IP rights to all of Linux and killed it off would the world grind to a stop?
No, we'd have the hoardable and underdeveloped BSD and the copylefted but immature GNU Hurd.
>
To imagine that Linux will be around forever and that encouraging that at ALL costs is foolish.
This is not about Linux, but freedom.
>
I work in the real world where companies have to make money and protect their IP.
IP doesn't exist. Patents and copyrights yes. And both are blocking progress and the distribution of wealth. Copyleft offers a way out.
>
If given a choice of a GPL license or a BSD license I opt for BSD every time.
Too bad it is hoardable. Do you realize it is the GNU GPL that better protects the authors' rights, and that's one of the reasons for the GNU/Linux success over BSDs? Moreover, that another one of the reasons BSDs never developed as fully was that the lack of copyleft propitiated forks that never contributed back to the community, like SunOS, NeXTStep, Ultrix and HP-UX?
>
They took BSD and created Darwin
Too bad Darwin is not nearly as free as BSD, not even as the GNU GPL. Too bad also it is useless without the proprietary Cocoa and Aqua.
>
I don't think Steve Jobs would care if his xservers were running Linux or better yet BSD (pref Darwin) without OSX.
Yes he cares. If he didn't he'd have gone fully free software.
>
I can't listen to this self centered propaganda any more.
>
Pixar is a company, and they need to use what gets the tool done in the best way for their process--not in the best way for the ideals of some "GNU/Linux" community.
So?
It is still a minor defeat for everyone's freedom.
BTW GNU/Linux is more than good enough. It will be difficult to argue if this change is because that's the best tool or because Steve Jobs is CEO to both companies and has a reality distortion field.
>
going to something that's BOTH closed source AND proprietary hardware is a really big gain for diversity.
First, Mac OS X isn't totally proprietary. It is not free software, but at least partially it is an open system, as in POSIX and OpenStep.
Second, the Power Macintosh in an open machine. For instance, it uses open standards in its OpenFirmware, an IEEE standard also used by the other RISC vendors. There are even clones, like the Genesi Pegaso and the AmigaOne. It at least help validates non-x86 PCI expansion cards...
Is Avalon MS trying again to estabilish a proprietary technology over an already-deployed one, in this case its own drawing model over Adobe's PostScript as present today in Mac OS, GNUStep and soon X Cairo?
This is so sad. They fail to have children, and then refuse to accept foreigners who need the jobs for a living. Then they want to make for children and robots? So recently entered modernity, and already decadent... the rest of the First World is decadent too, but at least has had some half a millenium of modernity.
I think it was a rabbi who said that a country without children is orphan. And I'd add that a rich country who refuse poor needy workers is without heart.
>
The US trade deficit with the rest of the world is at absurd levels.
The trade deficit is not a problem. You want good things from the rest of the world, you pay for it. It is your choice.
What is unfair is that the First World developed at a time when there were no international patents or copyrights or visa controls, so wealth and knowledge flowed free. Now you syphon the world's richness thru royalties on patents, trademarks, copyrights, and capital returns, you don't want people to go work in your countries, and you don't want the rest of the world to get better jobs.
Reading the article left me with one idea: people just don't care.
We have the same problem here in Brazil, and the same concerns were raised here, and guess what? Here, too, people don't care. There was little doubt about the election results, no one questioned the machines.
Now, clearly people don't care because caring is uncomfortable, thinking is tiresome, etc. This reminds me of one quote from one of the authors of your Constitution, to the effect that it was made for people with certain values and it would be no good for anyone not like that.
I propose democracy today won't ever be what it was once simply because people have changed. We might be heading for new Dark Ages, simply because we live in too big countries where what we think simply isn't important -- there are too many votes, too many voices. So why care?
Or at a even deeper level, even in small countries -- I lived at Switzerland -- people seem to have given up caring, because they are rich enough already, and they can't ever agree, so they vote endlessly and nothing is ever done.
>
back in 1998 The Open Group (now known as X.org) changed the licensing of X R6.4 to be proprietary, and only backed down when XFree86 and David Dawes explained exactly what they could with their proprietary server.
Not quite. I had a sideline participation at the time, emailing the X folks and putting them in contact with RMS.
In fact RMS and X were working out an agreement to GNU GPL the whole shebang, thus keeping it free while preserving The Open Group's interests, but XFree was adamant against it.
That move at the time would have preserved X.org, which today is basically a non-entity.
>
The NT kernel that was implemented in the 80860 had nothing to do with OS3.0
Yes, it had. It was heavily developed since the first MS OS/2 3.0 NT i860 prototypes, and perhaps little code was left, but the basic concepts -- fat microkernel, multiple personalities, MS-DOS heritage (only thru IBM OS/2 2 compatibility instead of MS Win32) -- were already there.
MS has heavily hyped the supposed DEC VMS heritage, but apart from some of the same people they have little in common -- not architecture, not interfaces, not reliability. What they have in common is being relatively slow. In fact it has been rumoured consistently that the supposedly chief MS WNT architect has been sidelined at least since the MS W64 efforts inception because he wanted to Do It Right instead of keeping brokenness by nearly absolute backwards compatibility which is impossible anyway.
>
in fact NT was nothing like NT until the 3.0 version (ever wondered what happened to the 1.0 and 2.0 versions:)?
They were called MS OS/2 1.X. Then MS split with IBM, IBM OS/2 2.X and over kept its superior Presentation Manager personality while MS grafted MS Win32 on the MS OS/2 3.0 NT kernel. Thus the name change and the bump.
This is all documented in a book by then MS OS/2 architect, a guy with a funny, seemingly Central European, name; and at various Byte articles pre-1,995, which unfortunately I'm not aware of being available on the Net.
>
When the research OS showed that the 860 was not viable as a general purpose architecture it was ported over MIPS
Right, the Alpha came later when it was shown to be a superior architecture. I stand corrected.
>
The NT kernel was never ported to the 960 which is an embedded processor.
You are probably right here, I stand corrected. But the i960 was conceived as a general purpose i860 successor, much in the i386 to i486 transition line, only the i860 was never good enough nor was the i960, thus both ended up in the embedded market which is where old general-purpose chips go to rest and die anyway. I'm not aware if their ISAs were compatible or a port was ever attempted, so I shouldn't have implied or said anything about MS WNT on the i960.
>
The x86 port came with the 3.0 version of NT, so in its initial release NT supported MIPS for the high end and X86 for the low end (under what the ARC consortium was supposed to move towards).
There was never such a general availability release, perhaps at most ISV seeding development copies, quality at most.
>
After Intel with its pentium FUD managed to kill off the MIPS vendors, DEC actually ported NT to the Alpha.
No, the Intergraph Clipper chip was the one Intel managed to kill yet stillborn. The MIPS, Alpha and PowerPC ports were all simultaneously launched, with the Clipper having been cancelled and the SPARC never getting Sun's and ISVs' interest.
>
SGI actually had some of their propietary MIPS machines like the Indigo booting NT kernels (spooky).
Not spooky at all. Spooky was the ARC with its MS-DOS FAT filesystem, Compaq-like, for an initialisation and BIOS component.
>
the most interesting result of this is that it appears microsoft made windows run on a mac
Very old news indeed. MS WNT started its life as MS OS/2 3.0 NT for the i860, later ported to the i960, then the Alpha, and finally the i386. There was port planned for the Clipper, a never released one for the SPARC, and commercial ones for MIPS and PowerPC.
Even MS W2K had an Alpha port that made it to the GM release but was never commercialised -- looks like there are OpenVMS diehards who still run this version on their Digital Personal Workstations. Since those times, the Mac has become more standard, with OpenFirmware, PCI and the such.
So there is nothing new here technologically. Only the marchitecture side is interesting: could this bring the PowerPC volumes nearer the x86 ones, and thus also the selling prices, or will the G5 be so old when the XBox 2 arrives, or will the XBox be such a flop it won't make a difference at all? Would this make the partners consider launching a Video Workstation or something the like by, say, IBM, running MS WXP on the PPC?
In other words, will MS by loosening the Wintel duopoly help bring platform diversity that ultimately benefits free software?
Slashdot Mirror
Permanence doesn't mean it will always be one's property, but that it will be so until he chooses to dispose of it or the law determines otherwise in some special circumstance as public need for disappropriation.
Patents and copy rights aren't patents because they are a concession of a private monopoly; the law doesn't need to create a special case of public need for disappropriation. It was never property, just a limited time concession of exclusive rights.
Until you choose to publish them, when they become public. The State chooses to give you limited exclusive rights for a determined period to incite you to express them for public benefit in the first place.
Not in the absence of copyrights. Before copyrights, one had to make sure of not allowing copies. For example, one didn't lend his manuscript for more time than necessary for reading -- copying took much longer. Remember, the goal of copy rights and patents is to incite publication.
Have you notice the subtlety? Copy rights aren't property, they themselves are owned. Only they are not property, but a temporary monopoly.
Another subtlety... saying patents shall have the attributes of property is subject to provisions subtracts some of the attributes of personal property, such as permanence.
Now I will concede that intellectual property has recently been inserted in the statutes books. This is a victory for those who use them as propaganda terms, but it doesn't make the concept any more legitimate than once personal property of another people (slavery, the Roman patriarcal powers) was once thought to be.
Just a matter of time. OO.org hasn't yet been properly Gnome HIG'ified.
Only that's not true. It is a professional system made by its users, while MS Windows is a substandard one made by hired coders commanded by marketers trying to please the users' managers. Got the difference?
The only GNU/Linux minus is time: it takes time to get it right. There is no reason why, say, Debian GNU/Linux with Gnome can't reach all the same qualities of MS Windows without loosing any benefits. That is, apart from the fact that security is inherently opposed to convenience. There are things that will always be more difficult simply to keep security; on the other hand the basic design is so much simpler that the complexity coming from security can easily be offset, especially if we eventually follow the GNU/Hurd road to Lisp system programming and the Gnome road to database storage as the filesystem engine.
This is a red herring. Gnome is already quite consistent, and has most apps one needs. 2.6 will need even less non-Gnome apps, such as Gnome PDF viewer being nearly as feature-complete as XPDF or Adobe Acrobat Reader for instance. It will take a few years, but there is no reason why OpenOffice.org, LyX and such foreign software won't be totally Gnome-ised and immature software such as Passepartout or Gnome PDF won't become full-featured.
Another red herring. In fact, it is much easier to integrate GNU/Linux, because it tends to follow open standards and even to create new open standards, instead of being subject to MS's bad case of NIHS. MS integrates well only with MS or other mature proprietary MS-platform software, but not with non-MS-platform software.
Centralisation would buy you precisely nothing, and would cost much. With centralisation things would move slower, be less flexible...
Consistency is yet another non-issue. Gnome and KDE are still pretty immature, but they are consistent. The fact that you can run Qt apps in Gnome and Gtk+ ones in KDE, and text and Motif or Athena or whatever in both, is a bonus.
In fact it has been argued that if we had had a single widget set since the dawn of X, now we'd have tons of obsolete software. As widgets were never a given, people have designed their apps to be easily ported to new ones, and now we have the luxury of apps that play well with lotsa them. For example, with GNU Emacs we've curses and Motif already, and will have Gtk+ soon; with LyX we have Qt and XForms already, and someone was porting to Gtk+... MS Windows apps so old as these were already rewritten or are dead or have become bloated, choose any number of these three options.
It is happening all the time, but the cultural gap is simply too big. Microsoft will only be able to cross it by ceasing to be Microsoft. In this sense the decision by the courts not to break Microsoft in several companies (games and content, OS, tools, apps, servers) was against MS own shareholders' best interests in the long term. But this is a decision shareholders could have taken without the courts.
As I've shown it is not about balance, but about GNU maturing.
No, it is just that 'upgrading' trademarks, copy rights and patents to a general category of property tends to extend them by association with real property, when they in fact need to be limited instead of extended.
It shouldn't matter, but we think by analogy.
There is one more requirement to consider something property: permanence and ownership. Copy rights and patents aren't permanent, and they are not actually owned by their holders, rather they are conceded by the State.
In the natural state one can own by force or tradition; not so with ideas or expression. The State concedes exclusive rights for a determined period to foster creation, but this does not property make, nor you will find the term in the statutes books. It was actually applied as a propaganda device by the constituents of the WIPO. One can argue that if patents are useful they are too long nowadays and anyway their application to software is too fuzzy to be useful, and that copy rights are contraproducent nowadays.
Had that with Debian, 2.6.2 worked like a charm. 2.6.3 got me the panic again, so I'm 2.6.2 still. Waiting for a fix for the ext3-on-LVMv2 bug to go production.
It doesn't. Patents do exist, copy rights do exist, but intellectual property is just a meaningless agregation of both plus trademarks. BTW none is a form of property, but limited rights of quite different types both among themselves and from property rights.
I never said patents aren't valid in themselves. Software patents specifically are illegitimate, and I believe copy rights are long surviving their usefulness, but these are other issues.
No, we'd have the hoardable and underdeveloped BSD and the copylefted but immature GNU Hurd.
This is not about Linux, but freedom.
IP doesn't exist. Patents and copyrights yes. And both are blocking progress and the distribution of wealth. Copyleft offers a way out.
Too bad it is hoardable. Do you realize it is the GNU GPL that better protects the authors' rights, and that's one of the reasons for the GNU/Linux success over BSDs? Moreover, that another one of the reasons BSDs never developed as fully was that the lack of copyleft propitiated forks that never contributed back to the community, like SunOS, NeXTStep, Ultrix and HP-UX?
Too bad Darwin is not nearly as free as BSD, not even as the GNU GPL. Too bad also it is useless without the proprietary Cocoa and Aqua.
Yes he cares. If he didn't he'd have gone fully free software.
Go elsewhere. This is /.
So?
But not Mac OS X.
So?
It is still a minor defeat for everyone's freedom.
BTW GNU/Linux is more than good enough. It will be difficult to argue if this change is because that's the best tool or because Steve Jobs is CEO to both companies and has a reality distortion field.
First, Mac OS X isn't totally proprietary. It is not free software, but at least partially it is an open system, as in POSIX and OpenStep.
Second, the Power Macintosh in an open machine. For instance, it uses open standards in its OpenFirmware, an IEEE standard also used by the other RISC vendors. There are even clones, like the Genesi Pegaso and the AmigaOne. It at least help validates non-x86 PCI expansion cards...
So Mac OS X isn't free software, and that means one less big, technically-savvy GNU/Linux user contributing to the community.
But still much better than if they had gone with that other OS, and a real gain for platform diversity.
Now if someone the like (DigitalDomain, anyone?) would go to GNU/Linux on the G5...
So the question is, what are the best free software drivers available?
Is Avalon MS trying again to estabilish a proprietary technology over an already-deployed one, in this case its own drawing model over Adobe's PostScript as present today in Mac OS, GNUStep and soon X Cairo?
This is so sad. They fail to have children, and then refuse to accept foreigners who need the jobs for a living. Then they want to make for children and robots? So recently entered modernity, and already decadent... the rest of the First World is decadent too, but at least has had some half a millenium of modernity.
I think it was a rabbi who said that a country without children is orphan. And I'd add that a rich country who refuse poor needy workers is without heart.
You seem to think it is an all-or-nothing proposition. It isn't, and the First World is giving a bad example to boot.
The trade deficit is not a problem. You want good things from the rest of the world, you pay for it. It is your choice.
What is unfair is that the First World developed at a time when there were no international patents or copyrights or visa controls, so wealth and knowledge flowed free. Now you syphon the world's richness thru royalties on patents, trademarks, copyrights, and capital returns, you don't want people to go work in your countries, and you don't want the rest of the world to get better jobs.
Not slow, just irrelevant.
If one needs 64 bitness and high performance, there is RISC, already proven and more efficient. All free and (or) POSIX software runs there.
If one needs 64 bitness and x86 compatibility, there is AMD64, to run proprietary software it will take years to recompile and prove in 64 bits.
So...
What bothers me is that none has a working Mozilla plugin for the PowerPC...
So I am still waiting for GtkHTML and Encompass to mature... oh wll, at least it is A Good Thing.
Reading the article left me with one idea: people just don't care.
We have the same problem here in Brazil, and the same concerns were raised here, and guess what? Here, too, people don't care. There was little doubt about the election results, no one questioned the machines.
Now, clearly people don't care because caring is uncomfortable, thinking is tiresome, etc. This reminds me of one quote from one of the authors of your Constitution, to the effect that it was made for people with certain values and it would be no good for anyone not like that.
I propose democracy today won't ever be what it was once simply because people have changed. We might be heading for new Dark Ages, simply because we live in too big countries where what we think simply isn't important -- there are too many votes, too many voices. So why care?
Or at a even deeper level, even in small countries -- I lived at Switzerland -- people seem to have given up caring, because they are rich enough already, and they can't ever agree, so they vote endlessly and nothing is ever done.
RIP Democracy.
What does 'deCOMtamination' (from the slides) mean? Perhaps ditching XPCOM and going native?
It should be possible now that even MS Windows have a measure of POSIX compatibility with both Cygwin and MS UIS.
Not quite. I had a sideline participation at the time, emailing the X folks and putting them in contact with RMS.
In fact RMS and X were working out an agreement to GNU GPL the whole shebang, thus keeping it free while preserving The Open Group's interests, but XFree was adamant against it.
That move at the time would have preserved X.org, which today is basically a non-entity.
Yes, it had. It was heavily developed since the first MS OS/2 3.0 NT i860 prototypes, and perhaps little code was left, but the basic concepts -- fat microkernel, multiple personalities, MS-DOS heritage (only thru IBM OS/2 2 compatibility instead of MS Win32) -- were already there.
MS has heavily hyped the supposed DEC VMS heritage, but apart from some of the same people they have little in common -- not architecture, not interfaces, not reliability. What they have in common is being relatively slow. In fact it has been rumoured consistently that the supposedly chief MS WNT architect has been sidelined at least since the MS W64 efforts inception because he wanted to Do It Right instead of keeping brokenness by nearly absolute backwards compatibility which is impossible anyway.
They were called MS OS/2 1.X. Then MS split with IBM, IBM OS/2 2.X and over kept its superior Presentation Manager personality while MS grafted MS Win32 on the MS OS/2 3.0 NT kernel. Thus the name change and the bump.
This is all documented in a book by then MS OS/2 architect, a guy with a funny, seemingly Central European, name; and at various Byte articles pre-1,995, which unfortunately I'm not aware of being available on the Net.
Right, the Alpha came later when it was shown to be a superior architecture. I stand corrected.
You are probably right here, I stand corrected. But the i960 was conceived as a general purpose i860 successor, much in the i386 to i486 transition line, only the i860 was never good enough nor was the i960, thus both ended up in the embedded market which is where old general-purpose chips go to rest and die anyway. I'm not aware if their ISAs were compatible or a port was ever attempted, so I shouldn't have implied or said anything about MS WNT on the i960.
There was never such a general availability release, perhaps at most ISV seeding development copies, quality at most.
No, the Intergraph Clipper chip was the one Intel managed to kill yet stillborn. The MIPS, Alpha and PowerPC ports were all simultaneously launched, with the Clipper having been cancelled and the SPARC never getting Sun's and ISVs' interest.
Not spooky at all. Spooky was the ARC with its MS-DOS FAT filesystem, Compaq-like, for an initialisation and BIOS component.
Very old news indeed. MS WNT started its life as MS OS/2 3.0 NT for the i860, later ported to the i960, then the Alpha, and finally the i386. There was port planned for the Clipper, a never released one for the SPARC, and commercial ones for MIPS and PowerPC.
Even MS W2K had an Alpha port that made it to the GM release but was never commercialised -- looks like there are OpenVMS diehards who still run this version on their Digital Personal Workstations. Since those times, the Mac has become more standard, with OpenFirmware, PCI and the such.
So there is nothing new here technologically. Only the marchitecture side is interesting: could this bring the PowerPC volumes nearer the x86 ones, and thus also the selling prices, or will the G5 be so old when the XBox 2 arrives, or will the XBox be such a flop it won't make a difference at all? Would this make the partners consider launching a Video Workstation or something the like by, say, IBM, running MS WXP on the PPC?
In other words, will MS by loosening the Wintel duopoly help bring platform diversity that ultimately benefits free software?
Nope, it's SQL.