On Fri, 7 Jan 1994, Scott Kaplan wrote:

> Brian Kendig had a good point when he wrote:
> >The fact that Apple's not giving out any technical information about their
> >chips shows me what GNU has against them... oh, well.

Wrong on a few counts.  First, GNU is an operating system, not an
organization.  Second, the boycott of Apple that was organized by 
the League for Programming Freedom (LPF) and is observed by the
Free Software Foundation (FSF) who are writing GNU has nothing
to do with giving out "technical information about chips".
Software like GCC has been ported to chips like Pentium for 
which Intel refused to provide full documentation without a
non-disclosure agreement, and the programmers exactly what the
Alice team has done -- they hacked and they made intelligent
guesses until they figured out how to make it work.

Apple is boycotted because it sued Microsoft and HP, claiming that
its copyright on various aspects of its user interface give it
the right to prevent MS, HP, and others from implementing similar
user interfaces -- even if they use no code whatsoever that is
copyrighted by Apple.

> I don't suppose there's anyone at Apple whom we could write to about this
> problem?  [ ... ]   Maybe Apple can be swayed?

Not a chance in hell.  FSF and LPF aren't going to budge, either.

-- Bill Johnston (johnston@me.udel.edu)
-- 38 Chambers Street; Newark, DE 19711; (302)368-1949



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