Originally posted by BlackStar
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And to think, I used to work literally nextdoor to the SGI headquarters. SGI used to be a huge booming business with offices all over the world and a growth curve comparable to Google; now they are more or less confined to one single-story edifice in Sunnyvale, CA. They had a nice cafeteria and our building didn't have a cafeteria at all, so sometimes my coworkers and I would go over there and buy lunch. Easier than hopping in the car to drive to a nearby food joint.
I'd wager that even most of SGI's old, loyal, professional 3d rendering customers have since moved on to NVIDIA, so what's keeping all those people employed? You guessed it. Patent royalties.
That's not to say I support what they're doing, of course; the greater good that could come about if their patents (let alone all software patents in general) were eliminated would far outweigh the good that is generated from keeping one or two-hundred upper-class citizens well-fed and taken care of.
I just wish I had taken the opportunity to sit down at the lunch table with one of their managers and listen to them try to justify their actions. But I was more naive about open source issues, and completely clueless about software patents, back in those days.
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