Judge orders SCO to show Linux infringement

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More on these points.

1. "That OS was by no means ready for prime time. MS had to do quite a bit of work on it to get it ready to be released as DOS 1.0 (then again, DOS 1.0 wasn't ready for prime time..)"

Microsoft couldn't have done *much* twiddling with QDOS, according to http://www.euronet.nl/users/frankvw/IhateMS.html:

"(Tim Paterson of SCP compiled QDOS in under 6 weeks. He left SCP in 1981 and joined Microsoft. Later Kildall allegedly went to IBM and pointed out where his own copyright statement was still embedded in PC-DOS, but he did not dare fight it out with the full force of IBM's legal division. Kildall's allegations of theft by SCP, and the fact that the differences between QDOS and CP/M are minute at best, can't have escaped Microsoft's attention at the time. This leads to the interesting conclusion that if this is true, then Microsoft and IBM knowingly acted as fences, and Microsoft founded a global empire on a crime.)"

HAHA! This is too rich! Gates accidentally left Gary Kildall's (creator of the CP/M OS) copyright statement in PC-DOS!

Further down, the author digs up a great quote from Gates (author's comment included):

"By the time PC-DOS took hold, Gates had already shown that Microsoft's future would hold very little innovation indeed. Gates' views on development are probably best illustrated by the following:

"From: 'Programmers at work', Microsoft Press, Redmond, WA [c1986]:
Interviewer: 'Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?'
Gates: 'No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system.'"

"Seldom have both Microsoft's lack of innovation and their kludgey, ad-hoc approach to software design been explained so concisely. It's also interesting to note that while many people have called Microsoft products copycat, trash or garbage, most of them probably had no idea how close to the truth they really were."

2. "To my understanding, Microsoft developed OS/2 to a great extent.. (being paid by IBM to do it).
Again, to my understanding, MS' contract with IBM was that MS would retain rights to the code they wrote. "

You can read about OS/2 and the IBM/Microsoft relationship here:

http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/OS2Warp.html

According to this, IBM developed the COM, DDE and OLE (now ActiveX) technologies which Microsoft has used in all their OS offerings up to this day. Without these, Windows would be little more than a DOS task-switching shell.

3. "Microsoft had left their relationship with IBM quite a while before Win95.. "

Microsoft continues to use key technologies developed by IBM in their entire product line, up to this day in XP and Server 2003. According to what I understand, Microsoft has to maintain cross-licensing agreements with IBM in order to be able to have the necessary technologies to offer an OS.

Again, perusing the sources (often by those who were there at the time), I see no evidence that *doesn't* support my contention: Microsoft has never had the moxy to write an entire OS in-house. The company just doesn't attract that level of talent. They have to purchase their talent from other companies (or coerce code, as in the case of IBM/Win95-NT). And in the case of DOS and GWbasic, it's alleged that Microsoft in no uncertain terms stole other people's intellectual properties--and got away with it.

Posted by: Yen_z   Posted on: 12/08/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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