Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for June 17, 2024

Alex was born with computer knowledge, unlike me, from 1940.

Aw, nuts! I was hoping for a strip showing “Uncle Stupidhead” throwing a fit when Alex tells him he won’t get a penny of JJ’s grant!

Oh look. We’ve discovered Microsoft/Google/Meta’s business plan. They don’t bother with letting rival fail and then paying a middleman. They just swoop in and buy them out at premium at the first whiff of potential success.

Funny how these players have all this capital to buy up rivals, yet enjoy such low tax rates.

As Mike’s operation becomes the Big Lots of intellectual property…

Because it was just a formality.

Why do I suspect Alex may be talking about real babies?

It is a happy man who can learn his place in the matriarchy.

Because you have accepted your role as a figurehead, Mike.

Unfinished source code us useless if it isn’t properly commented.

Buy the old “Tea party” websites. they’re calling themselves something much more menacing these days

I take it he doesn’t literally “sign” anything, just nods.

Does this mean that JJ actually did get to $500K grant??? That would be a worse affront to sensibilities than the white on white “art” of the 60s!

She was Google, before Google !

Who is going to pay money to get IP from failed dotcoms?

When it comes to “unfinished source code”, I’ve got a primo candidate for you: The US Constitution, the release version of the beta known as Articles of Confederation. It’s had 27 upgrades to it since Version 1.0, but there’s still a lot of polishing left to do. For example, half a dozen of those upgrades were bug fixes for the fact that the base program didn’t just come right out and guarantee a right to vote. And then there are these giant loopholes that let supposed experts decide that corporations are people and free spending is a form of free speech.

But we know this puppy is ripe for acquisition, since the vendor hasn’t done any upgrades since 1992, and that was based on a user request dating back to 1789 that they finally got around to.

Patent trolling.

That sounds vaguely illegal. But I’m not sure what protection a half-finished invention, especially computer code, might have.