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I thought I'd do a quick Google search and see if good ol' Microsoft has ever "appropriated" any code themselves. In just a few minutes, I found eight instances where Microsoft lost court battles over the code they stole. Here you go:

As a response to Digital Research's DR-DOS 6.0, which bundled SuperStor disk compression, Microsoft opened negotiations with Stac Electronics, vendor of the most popular DOS disk compression tool, Stacker. Stac was unwilling to meet Microsoft's terms for licensing Stacker and withdrew from the negotiations. In the due diligence process, Stac engineers had shown Microsoft some Stacker source code. However, Microsoft chose to license Vertisoft's DoubleDisk instead of Stacker.[2]

Soon, MS-DOS 6.0 was released, including the Microsoft DoubleSpace disk compression utility program. Stac successfully sued Microsoft for patent infringement regarding the compression algorithm used in DoubleSpace. This resulted in the release of MS-DOS 6.21, which had disk-compression removed. Shortly afterwards came version 6.22, with a new version of the disk compression system, DriveSpace, rewritten to avoid the infringing code.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS

A new patent battle is brewing -- this time over Microsoft's (Quote) claim over Caller ID for E-Mail.

F. Scott Deaver, owner of Failsafe Designs, says Microsoft is guilty of the "outright theft" of his product name and intellectual property (IP), and will seek legal and financial redress from the Redmond, Wash., software giant and anyone else that uses his technology that verifies e-mail is coming from the domain it claims.

http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3 393891

Alacritech® Inc., the innovator of Dynamic TCP Offload(TM) data acceleration solutions that enable the highest performance and efficiency in networked systems, today announced a U.S. District Court granted Alacritech's motion for preliminary injunction to prevent Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT) from making, using, offering for sale, selling, importing or inducing others to use Microsoft's "Chimney" TCP offload architecture slated to be available in both the "Longhorn" version of the Windows® operating system and in the Scalable Networking Pack for Windows Server(TM) 2003.

Alacritech sued Microsoft in Federal District Court on August 11, 2004, alleging that Microsoft's existing and future operating systems containing the "Chimney" TCP offload architecture uses Alacritech's proprietary SLIC Technology® architecture. The suit is based on two of Alacritech's fundamental patents relating to scalable networking, U.S. Patent No. 6,427,171 and U.S. Patent No. 6,987,868, both entitled "Protocol Processing Stack for use with Intelligent Network Interface Device."

http://www.alacritech.com/html/041305Alacritech_Gr anted_PI.shtml

In April 2001, Intertrust initiated a lawsuit against Microsoft. The lawsuit ultimately accused Microsoft of infringing 11 of Intertrust's patents and almost 130 of the company's patent claims.

The lawsuit centered on accused products based on the following technologies:

DRM and product activation technologies .NET and related security technologies
Trusted and reliable operating system technologies
In bringing the patent infringement lawsuit, Intertrust believed that Microsoft's forward-going technology infrastructure significantly relied on Intertrust's inventions for DRM and trusted computing.

http://www.intertrust.com/main/ip/settlement.html

(Redwood Shores, CA, December 15, 2005) - Visto Corporation has filed a legal action against Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) for misappropriating Visto's intellectual property. The complaint ass

This is more than "A network card with a CPU", its also the technology "SLIC" to go along with the ASIC card. SLIC was copied by Microsoft after meeting with Alacritech, and then Microsoft saying they invented it, and broke all communications.

Now, Microsoft might say that the technology already existed, but its too specialized, with parts on the CPU and parts on the Network card. I suspect Microsoft will just license the technology and end suit but not after trying years of legal bills.

http://www.alacritech.com/html/tech_review.html has details on the technology.

lawsuit documents were prepared with microsoft word:

http://www.alacritech.com/assets/applets/Motion_fo r_Preliminary_Injunction.pdf

isn't filing suit against microsoft against their software license agreement? or if you do decide to sue microsoft, you agree to stop using their software?

Below, find three sequential elements from the timeline in TFA.

• 09/98 - Alacritech meets with Microsoft and describes patent-pending Dynamic TCP Offload architecture in detail under a non-disclosure agreement
• 04/99 - At Microsoft's request, Alacritech delivers detailed architecture document for integrating Alacritech SLIC Technology into Windows
• 06/99 - Microsoft ceases further communications with Alacritech and subsequently proceeds to use Alacritech SLIC Technology without a license

How many articles have we seen here on /. that duplicates this pattern? Who else has been stepped on by the giant in such manner? I'm sure somebody could find a fist-full of articles here in history that shows exactly that behavior pattern.

Am I correct in recalling that Novell got stung? IBM? I know those are giants themselves. I'm just glad to see that a little David has been able to sling his stone bullet into the face of the Goliath. Now, let's see if they can make it really count.

I'm not asking to shut down Microsoft. Just have them play fair.

Is that too much to ask, Bill?

(Bill: "Why, yes. It is.")

- - -
When you say that you agree to a thing in principle, you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice. -- Otto Von Bismarck
(this sig stolen from /.)

If I am to believe the marketing, the first to do this kind of complete offloading were Alacritech, with their TCP/IP Accelerator. Unfortunately, you have to register to see their benchmark reports.

You should look into their NIC - As usual, the info is here.

I've met with these folks to talk about this specific card. Quite cool, as it offloads the IP stack on to the card to lessen the processor load on the actual CPU. They claim that for some applications, you will see as much as 100% performance increase.

Now, I have my doubts about that, but I can see something in the order of 30-45%. It has DMA and all sorts of other goodies that you'd expect, and it works quite well for fileservers (if that's what you're looking for.)

-Erk